Quandy Factory Newsfeed - All

Services-First: A Better Way to Build a Web Application (DRAFT)

2012-02-02T12:00:00Z

Introduction

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

When you're building a web application, it's a powerful design heuristic to build a REST web service API, and build your application on top of your service.

The functionality your application needs to perform should all be accessible or at least exposable as web services. This enforces a responsible design approach that will pay real dividends in maintainability, extendability and reduced technical debt.

It may also pay unexpected dividends in generating value over and above the principal goal of your web application. By thinking about your application design as a web service, you open up the possibility that the real value you deliver is not what you thought your service was going to be, but some subsidiary or extraneous solution you develop that turns out to be a) useful to others and b scalable/profitable.

The Infamous Yegge Platform Rant

Last October, Google engineer Steve Yegge posted a long, thoughtful rant on his public Google+ page in which he argued that Google "does everything right" - except platforms, which he argues Google still doesn't really understand. Rather, Google provides products, not services.

Yegge's argument was directed internally at his fellow Googlers, and he took the essay down after realizing that he had accidentally posted it publicly. Luckily for us, copies are still available with Yegge's blessing.)

Yegge contrasted his former employer, Amazon, which overwhelmingly adopted a services-first approach after founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ordered every department in the company to start exposing its functions to the rest of the company as a web service. According to Yegge:

[T]he first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com.

According to Yegge, this services-first approach has allowed Amazon to serve as a platform on which other companies build their businesses.

Dogfooding

Operating as a platform drastically increases the accessibility of a company's products and increases that likelihood that someone will build a "killer app" on the platform.

In Amazon's case, the killer app is Amazon's own business, which runs on the AWS platform (though a number of third party companies have also built their applications on top of the AWS platform).

Yegge stresses the vital importance of building on your own platform:

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything."

Yegge points out that it might be painful to maintain the discipline to eat your own dogfood, but it is far more painful and expensive to turn a monolithic application into a platform after the fact.

If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

According to Yegge, Amazon went through the painful exercise of transforming itself from a product company into a platform company because of necessity:

[I]t took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

Amazon Web Services

Here is how Bezos himself explained the strategy in his latest annual letter to shareholders:

Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic that encapsulate the data they operate on and provide hardened interfaces as the only way to access their functionality. This approach reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system. Service-oriented architecture - or SOA - is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

Amazon launched its first web service - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - in 2006. Since then, it has followed up with a long list of additional services:

CloudFront - low latency global CDN
DevPay - accounts receivable service
DynamoDB and SimpleDB - schemaless nosql key/value store
ElastiCache - scalable in-memory cache
Elastic MapReduce - distributed mapreduce processing for huge datasets
Flexible Payment Service (FPS) - digital payment service
Mechanical Turk - on-demand human intelligence market
Relational Database Service (RDS) - relational database
Simple Email Service (SES) - bulk and transactional email service
Simple Notification Service (SNS) - send notifications
Simple Storage Service (S3) - data storage and retrieval
Route 53 - Domain Name System service

None of these service are central to Amazon's core business, which is selling books and other consumer products directly to consumers. However, they all began life internally as essential peripheral or supporting functions.

Today, the company can sell these web services publicly because Bezos had the foresight to insist that the company conduct its internal affairs via web services.

The company is secretive about how much revenue it earns directly from its suite of web services, but the best estimates are that revenue reached $500 million in 2010 and $750 million in 2011. Web service revenue is expected to reach $1 billion in 2012 and $2.6 billion in 2015.

Services-First

No matter what you build, you will develop expertise in a number of related, peripheral functions that support your primary product. If you develop your product in a services-first fashion, you allow for the possibility to expose those peripheral functions to third parties.

No initial product idea survives first contact with the market. Every successful business is successful because it was able to adjust - sometimes wildly - its product and business strategy in response to real-world feedback. Startup gurus call this "pivoting", and a founder's ability to pull it off is decisive in the survival of the business.

Pivoting doesn't mean throwing away what you've built and starting over. Rather, it means re-purposing what you've built to reach a more promising market.

Many successful startup products started out as components of larger, less focused products. In his book The Lean Startup, entrepreneur Eric Ries calls this the "zoom-in pivot". Other businesses started out assuming they would be selling to one market and ended up attracting interest from a different sector altogether.

A services-first approach decouples your product from the platform it's built on, allowing you more flexibility to change it as required. It also allows you to provide the platform itself to clients as an additional source of value.

Designing Your Web Application

So when building your web application, it's a powerful design heuristic to build a web service first, and then build the application on top of it.

Why a Heuristic?

Application design is non-deterministic. There is not one "right" way to do things. Ten different designers given the same problem will create ten different solutions - and any number of them can be 'good enough'.

When you can't reason your way to a proof, you have to fall back on a less certain, more exploratory approach. A heuristic is a method of approaching the problem that tends to help you produce good solutions but falls short of being a solution itself.

Think of a heuristic as a general rule of thumb rather than a specific prescription.

Design Goals

For the end user, a web service should be:

Useful - The most elegant web service in the world won't interest anyone if it doesn't solve real problems.
Usable - Similarly, the most useful web service won't be adopted if people can't figure out how to use it.
Explorable - The easier it is to navigate and discover what a service does and how to use it, the more it will be adopted.
Accessible - In the case of a web service, accessibility means a variety of clients can use and interact with it.
Combinable - The purpose of web APIs is so clients can combine data and functionality from a variety of sources to build new things.
Flexible - Your own product is not the only thing that can be built with your platform. Your API should be open enough to allow for use cases you couldn't imagine.

For the web service developer, a web service should offer and/or encourage:

Clean, consistent organization of data and functionality
Separation of different layers in the application stack
Flexibility to change the application built on it
Clarity of abstractions

Finally, the developer is also an end user and will also benefit from usefulness, usability, discoverability and so on.

Design Considerations

With these goals in mind, I propose the following design considerations. Again, since design is non-deterministic, these considerations can help you to make decisions in the open-ended design process that will tend to point you toward a better final product.

Design for Adoption

The entire purpose of an API is for people to use it. If you're not sure how to design something, use this question as a guide: What will make it easier for users to understand how this works and how to use it?

If you force yourself to be a user, you will be more inclined to look at the API from the user's perspective.

Design for Maintainability

Developers spend more time fixing, refactoring and modifying existing code than they spend creating new code. Your API should be designed in such a way that it is easy to dive in and work with existing code. One way to achieve this is through what the Rails developers call convention over configuration. A architecture that builds on established standards will be easier to maintain.

Representational State Transfer (REST)

REST is a style of web service architecture based around clients and servers that closely models the way HTTP works. In a RESTful system, a client makes a request for a resource on a server, and the server issues a response that includes a representation of the resource.

The concept was formalized in 2000 by Roy Fielding, one of the architects of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), in his doctoral dissertation. It is not surprising, then, that REST and HTTP mesh very smoothly.

A RESTful client-server system is stateless, meaning each request against the server contains all the information the server needs to process it; and cacheable, in that the server can specify whether and for how long resource representations can be cached either locally on the client or on intermediate servers between the client and the server.

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless protocol based on a client requesting a resource across a network and the server providing a response. As such, an HTTP transaction entails a request and a response. The request goes from the client to the server, and the response goes from the server back to the client.

HTTP Requests and Responses

In HTTP, the client makes an HTTP request to the server and the server issues an HTTP response.

Requests

An HTTP request has three parts:

The request line, which includes the HTTP method, the URL and the HTTP version: GET /users/1 HTTP/1.1
One or more optional HTTP headers, which are key/value pairs with metadata about the data being requested and/or provided.
An optional message body, which is data being sent from the client to the server as part of the request. E.g. in a POST request, the message body will include the data that the server should use to create a new resource.

Response

An HTTP response also has three parts:

The HTTP Status Code, which indicates the status of the requested resource: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
One or more optional HTTP headers, which are key/value pairs with metadata about the response being provided.
An optional message body, which is a representation of the resource that was requested (hence the name "Representational State Transfer").

Idempotence

This funny-looking word is really important: a request is idempotent if making it multiple times has the same effect as making it just once. Read that again if you have to.

A request is not idempotent if issuing it more than once has a different effect than issuing it once. For example, a POST request to add a comment to a document is not idempotent: issuing the POST request twice adds the comment twice, so that the document contains two comments with unique URLs.

URLs and Resources

In a RESTful architecture, each URL represents a resource. This is vitally important: a resource is a noun, an object, and not the action performed on it.

A RESTful web service has multiple endpoints - one for each resource. (Contrast SOAP, which has only one endpoint and puts everything else - objects, methods, parameters, etc. - into the XML payload.)

If you find yourself creating URLs like /create_user, you're doing it wrong. Instead, create a URL like /users and map your user object to that URL.

Remember: a resource is a noun, not a verb.

HTTP Methods

If a resource is a noun, the HTTP Method is the verb. What you do to the resource with your request depends on what method you use. If a URL is an object, the HTTP method is the action you execute on that object.

HTTP Methods
Method	Action
GET	Retrieve a resource
POST	Create a new resource
PUT	Update an existing resource
DELETE	Delete an existing resource

In our user example, execute an HTTP POST request on /users to create a new user. The server should respond with the specific URL of the user you created: /users/1.

To view a representation of that resource, issue an HTTP GET request on the user's URL: /users/1.

To update the user, issue an HTTP POST request on the user's URL with the new user data in the request body.

To delete the user, issue an HTTP DELETE request on the user's URL.

GET Method

To retrieve a resource, issue an HTTP GET request. GET requests are idempotent (see below), which means making a GET request multiple times does not cause any change in the resource that is requested.

GET requests do not include a message body, but GET responses usually do.

POST Method

To submit data to be processed, issue an HTTP POST request. POST requests require a message body, i.e. the data to be processed.

For example, if there is a resource called /articles and you want to add a new article, issue a POST request to /articles with the content. The server should create a new subsidiary URI under /articles - for example, /articles/1 - and assign that URL to the content you sent with your POST request.

Important note: POST requests are not idempotent, meaning multiple POST requests will create multiple resources with unique identifiers.

PUT Method

To update the resource at an existing URL, issue an HTTP PUT request on that URL. For example, if there is a URL /articles/1 and you want to replace the content served at that URL, issue a PUT request to that URL with the new content.

Important note: PUT requests are idempotent, so issuing 2 or 5 or 50 identical PUT requests will have the same effect on the resource as issuing just one PUT request. Like POST requests, PUT requests include a message body (the resource to be placed at the URL).

DELETE Method

To remove a resource (and remove its accompanying URL), issue an HTTP DELETE request. DELETE requests should be idempotent, i.e. issuing 1 or 2 or 5 or 50 identical DELETE requests will delete exactly one resource. DELETE requests do not require a message body.

HTTP Headers

Both HTTP requests and responses can include optional HTTP Headers, or key/value pairs that supply meta-data about the request and the response.

Accept Header

An HTTP request can include an Accept header that specifies what media types the client will accept in a response.

In a REST web service, the request should include an Accept header with the preferred media type - e.g. application/json - and the server should attempt to fulfill the client's preference in its response, given its capabilities.

If you are willing or required support multiple formats (e.g. JSON, XML, YAML), the best way for the client to specify what format they prefer is via the Accept header.

Here are some examples of Accept headers:

JSON: Accept: application/json
XML: Accept: application/xml
YAML: Accept: application/x-yaml

Note: YAML has an x- prefix because it is not a formalized MIME type. For thoroughness, you could accept all four possibilities:

application/x-yaml, application/yaml, text/x-yaml, text/yaml

HTTP Status Codes

HTTP has a great way of telling the client whether the request was successful or an error has occurred: HTTP status codes. Every HTTP response includes a status header with an HTTP status code that indicates the status of the request.

This tells the client whether the request was successful or not, and what to expect by way of a response. It's important to send the right status code.

401 Unauthorized (Image Source: Flickr)

I also include HTTP status codes and error descriptions in the response body. A REST purist might call this overkill, but remember that you want to make your API as self-documenting and easy to use as possible.

For the purposes of your web service, there are three categories of HTTP status codes you need to worry about: success codes, client error codes, and server error codes.

Success Codes

HTTP success status codes provide useful information about successful requests:

200 OK - A GET request was successful at retrieving a resource.
201 Created - A POST request was successful at creating a resource.
202 Accepted - This means the request was accepted but the response is not ready. Useful for queued or otherwise deferred processes.

Client Error Codes

400 Bad Request - The request data could not be parsed properly, or a value was missing or invalid.
401 Unauthorized - The user requested an access-restricted resource but authentication either failed or was not provided.
404 Not Found - The user tried to request a resource that does not exist.
405 Method Not Allowed - User tried to execute an HTTP method on a resource that does not allow it. E.g. a POST request against /users/charlie instead of /users.
406 Not Acceptable - The request came with an Accept header for a media type that the server cannot provide in the response.
410 Gone - A previously available resource has been removed permanently.
429 Too Many Requests - Useful if you've rate-limited your API for a given user.

Server Error Codes

500 Internal Server Error - Try to avoid this one. It generally means your web service is broken.
501 Not Implemented - User has tried to send a request method that your server doesn't recognize.
503 Service Unavailable - This tells the client the service disruption is temporary.

Designing a RESTful Web Service

Don't Reinvent the Wheel

HTTP was invented to allow clients to request resources from servers across the internet and for those servers to respond with representations of those resources. The entire internet runs on it. It's flexible, powerful and offers a clean abstraction model based on resources and methods.

Don't re-implement what HTTP does in an ad-hoc way on top of HTTP. Just use HTTP.

Many web services only use HTTP as a network tunneling protocol, and then pass objects, methods and parameters inside an 'envelope' that contains all the information. This type of web service architecture includes SOAP and other Remote Procedure Call (RPC) formats.

Web services that actually use HTTP the way it was designed are called Representative State Transfer (REST) web services. Unfortunately, REST is widely misunderstood and a lot of web services that call themselves "RESTful" aren't.

Discoverable API

In a RESTful web service, a GET request on a base API URL returns a list of resources available in the API. Critically, each resource has a direct URL. This makes it very easy for developers to step into your API and figure out what is available.

Now, you may be thinking you've seen this pattern before. You're right: it's exactly how every single website works. Go to the homepage, and what do you find? Links to the other resources on the website!

A RESTful approach makes your URLs hackable. If your API user is looking at a URL like: /cats/miss_mew, they should be able to lop off the /miss_mew and do a GET request against /cats to return the base collection of cats (each with its own URL, of course).

REST Resource/Method Matrix

At a conceptual level, a RESTful web service API is a matrix of resources and methods that exposes the functionality of the service to third party applications. Below is an example of what that matrix might look like.

Again, I will repeat that actions are not mapped to URLs. A resource is an object - a noun - and the action inheres to the HTTP method - a verb - not to the URL.

As a result, the same resource URL can serve different responses (corresponding with different actions) depending on the HTTP method used.

REST Resource/Method Matrix
Request				Response			Idempotent
Resource	URL	Method	Request Data	Server Action	Response Body	Status Code	Idempotent
Users	/users	GET		retrieves list of users	list of users and associated URLs	200 OK	Yes
Users	/users	POST	user details	creates a new user	new URL and user representation	201 Created	No
User 9001	/users/9001	GET		retrieves details for user 9001	user representation	200 OK	Yes
User 9001	/users/9001	PUT	new user details	updates user details	updated user representation	200 OK	Yes
User 9001	/users/9001	DELETE		deletes user 9001	returns status	200 OK	Yes
User 9001	/users/9001	GET		checks that user 9001 does not exist	Not found error message	404 Not Found	Yes

Use JSON

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a data serialization format that delivers an optimal combination of the following criteria:

Lightweight - less boilerplate means less data transfered across the network
Readable - Humans can easily see and understand the content of a JSON object
Flexible - allows various nestable data types: object (dictionary), array (ordered list), string, integer, float, boolean
Interoperable - every programming language and framework under the sun can generate and consume JSON.
Convertable - JSON can be converted into a native object more easily than XML.

Here's an example of a response to an API base URL GET request, represented in JSON:

{
    "ok": true,
    "status_code": 200,
    "resources": [
        {
            "url": "/authors",
            "resource": "authors"
        },
        {
            "url": "/articles",
            "resource": "articles"
        },
        {
            "url": "/blogs",
            "resource": "blogs"
        },
        {
            "url": "/comments",
            "resource": "comments"
        },
        {
            "url": "/events",
            "resource": "events"
        }
    ]
}

Unless you've got a compelling business or technical reason for using a different media type, stick with JSON.

Search

Since grammatically, "search" can be a noun as well as a verb, it's okay to have a URL called /search. Arguably, the best way to filter the response a server delivers to a GET request on /search is to use a querystring:

/search?doctype=article&keyword=hello%20world

It is possible to do this without a querystring - something like:

/search/doctype/article/keyword/hello%20world

But that's silly and pedantic - and arguably wrong, anyway. It's harder for your users to guess and it's harder for you to parse.

Pagination

When your user does a GET request on /api/cats, do they really want a list of 7 million cats? Do you really want to have to serve that and support the processing and bandwidth involved?

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with using querystrings here:

/api/cats?offset=101&limit=50

Similarly, I don't think there's anything wrong with using terminology that is familiar to developers who work with databases.

Versioning

Your API is a contract you have made with your users. If you plan to introduce a change to your API that breaks backwards compatibility, you need to do so in such a way that it doesn't break existing clients.

There is no easy, obvious way to do this that will make everyone happy, satisfy REST and satisfy the goal of making your API usable and discoverable.

There are a few different ways you can version your API, all of which have pros and cons.

Versioning in URL

Many popular web APIs do this: /api/v1/cats. If you roll out a version 2 of your API that would break clients using version 1, you expose it at api/v2/cats.

Pro: it's easy for users to understand and doesn't break existing clients.
Con: results in multiple URLs for the same resource; locks versioning into the URL; multiplies API maintenance issues.

Versioning in Querystring

Some APIs do this: api/cats?v=1.

Pro: default URL doesn't need to include version (defaults to newest version); one URL for each resource.
Con: clients that don't explicitly specify a version will break when the API is updated.

Versioning in Accept header

REST purists recommend putting the version in a custom Accept header: Accept: application/vnd.company.app-v1+json

Pro: default URL doesn't need to include version; one URL for each resource; changes do not break clients; version is a formatting issue so it's the "right" place.
Con: more esoteric and difficult for developers to discover how it works.

Use Secure HTTP

I don't want to say too much about security (though I do recommend the REST Security Cheat Sheet - Draft document from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as a handy reference), but I will say a quick word in support of Secure HTTP - or HTTPS - rather than plaintext HTTP.

HTTPS is a bit slower, but on a web service, you're not making multiple requests to pull down javascripts, CSS, image files and so on, so you can afford to take a small hit for an encrypted connection.

The payback in client security is worth it.

Summary of Benefits

It's extremely easy to lose yourself in theory and get sucked into the purity movement (remember XHTML?). If REST doesn't deliver practical results, it doesn't matter how elegant, pure or canonical it claims to be.

In short, a RESTful API is discoverable and navigable. With no background knowledge, a client can do a GET request on the root URL to get a list of resources with URLS. It's easy to dive right in and quickly figure out what is available.

Better URLs

Stable, persistent URLs allow for resource bookmarking and better search indexing.

Sane, well-named URLs are more descriptive than arcane or arbitrarily named URLs.

Hackable URLs allow for better resource discovery.

Developers Understand HTTP

REST is essentially just HTTP, and we already understand HTTP (with an important caveat, below).

The API developer doesn't need to waste time and energy (badly) reinventing/re-implementing what HTTP does on top of HTTP.

The client doesn't need to waste time and energy learning a bunch of ad hoc RPC protocols.

Our Tools Understand HTTP

Just about every programming language can natively perform an HTTP request and parse the response (with an important caveat, below).

Problems with REST

REST comes with its own issues, of course, and it would be disingenuous to gloss over them.

Requires Proper Understanding of HTTP

Much as I wrote earlier that REST is just HTTP and we all understand HTTP, the honest fact is that we don't understand HTTP all that well.

It's true we've all been using it for 20 years now, but for various historical, cultural and educational reasons, there's a constant tension between understanding and using our protocols the way they were designed and knowing just enough to build something that gets the job done.

That latter imperative lowers the barrier to entry into web development, but it also leads to the same avoidable mistakes being made over and over again in applications that require a more professional approach: SQL injection, XSS, hacked cleartext passwords, and so on.

We've all heard horror stories about web applications that didn't understand HTTP and blew up when a search engine bot innocently crawled a GET request to /delete_user.php?username=Ryan and thereby wiped out the entire database.

For a newbie developer who doesn't really understand HTTP very well, a web service with URLs like /api/create_user is more immediately obvious than a web service with URLs like /api/users that require a POST request to create a user.

However, this is changing as the benefits of REST become more widely known and more developers start to take advantage of its defining characteristics.

One thing is for certain: once you've developed and built on a REST web service, you'll finally understand HTTP inside and out.

Tooling

SOAP advocates argue that mature tooling makes it easy for a service provider to deploy a WSDL and for clients to consume it and execute web service methods as if they were local function calls.

Of course, the reality is less rosy: leaky abstractions, incompatible data types, lack of interoperability between, say, a Java WSDL and a C# SOAP client, and so on.

In far too many cases, I've had to hand-roll an ad-hoc SOAP client and build my own XML templates when a supposedly push-button WSDL turned out to be platform-dependent. Instead of saving time by consuming a WSDL, I was stuck painstakingly reverse-engineering the RPC formatting details that the interface tried unsuccessfully to hide.

Still, SOAP has that enterprise-friendly turnkey appeal, even if the delivery doesn't fulfill the promise.

REST, on the other hand, is sorely lacking in push-button tooling - on both the framework development and client side.

Even tools that ought to know better tend to abstract away the HTTP methods from the developer and generically treat every request as a GET request - unless it comes with form data or hits a kludgy /process_form kind of an URL.

We've come a long way from the cgi-bin form processing scripts of the '90s, but we still have a way to go. The good news is that this changing as developers come to recognize the benefits that come from understanding and using HTTP the way it was designed.

Frameworks

Most web application frameworks weren't developed with HTTP in mind, but rather with the minimal subset of HTTP that that is comprised of viewing web pages and filling out forms. Data transfer and processing, even in web applications designed for human users, tends unconsciously to follow an RPC model.

There are already a few that have embraced the full functionality of HTTP more deeply.

I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but I understand Rails 3 is designed to work RESTfully right out of the box with its routing DSL.

Similarly, the lightweight Sinatra framework understands resources and methods natively and simply:

require 'sinatra'

get '/users' do
  # show users
end

get '/users/1337' do
  # show a user
end

post '/users' do
  # create a user
end

put '/users/1337' do
  # update a user
end

delete '/users/1337' do
  # delete a user
end

In Python, Django is not RESTful by design has some good REST plugins.

The lightweight Python framework I use, web.py, is REST-friendly at its core: resources map to classes and HTTP methods map to class methods.

import web

app = web.application(urls, globals())

urls = ('/users/(.*)', 'User')

class User(object):
    def GET(self, name):
        # get a resource

    def POST(self, name):
        # create a resource

    def PUT(self, name):
        # update a resource

    def DELETE(self, name):
        # delete a resource

In PHP, you've got Zend_REST, Recess, Tonic and others that understand and support RESTful API design.

The .Net framework has Windows Communications Foundation (WCF). Java has Play RESTlet, Jersey and so on.

Client Tools

Nearly every language understands HTTP, but too many default HTTP modules understand HTTP in a crippled, semi-literate way that reflects how most browsers use HTTP: fetch pages or fill out forms.

In Python, there are no less than three HTTP libraries that ship with the language: urllib, urllib2 and httplib - and none of them make the full expressiveness of HTTP particularly accessible.

Fortunately, third party developers have stepped in with libraries like httplib2 and requests, which do a much better job of exposing all the HTTP methods in a sane, consistent manner.

Similarly, REST-aware clients are appearing in other languages as well.

If you're a .net shop, you've got tools like RestSharp.

Of course, JavaScript understands HTTP natively, perhaps better than some other, more "mature" and "full-featured" languages - possibly because JavaScript lives in browsers and breathes HTTP.

var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();

// GET request
xmlhttp.open("GET", "/users", true);
xmlhttp.send();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
        alert('GET request successful'); 
        // response is in xmlhttp.responseText
    }
}

// POST request
var jsonObject = {"username": "ryan", "fullName": "Ryan McGreal"};
var jsonString = JSON.stringify(jsonObject);
xmlhttp.open("POST", "/users", true);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/json");
xmlhttp.send(jsonString);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
        alert('POST request successful'); 
        // response is in xmlhttp.responseText
    }
}

// PUT request
var jsonObject = {"username": "ryan", "fullName": "Ryan G. McGreal"};
var jsonString = JSON.stringify(jsonObject);
xmlhttp.open("PUT", "/users/ryan", true);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/json");
xmlhttp.send(jsonString);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
        alert('PUT request successful'); 
        // response is in xmlhttp.responseText
    }
}

// DELETE request
xmlhttp.open("DELETE", "/users/ryan", true);
xmlhttp.send();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
        alert('DELETE request successful'); 
        // response is in xmlhttp.responseText
    }
}

JavaScript also has a panoply of frameworks and libraries that make HTTP requests even easier:

// yay jQuery!

$.get("/users", function(response){ alert('GET request successful'); });

$.post("/users", data, function(response){ alert('POST request successful'); });

$.put("/users/ryan", data, function(response){ alert('PUT request successful'); });

$.delete("/users/ryan", function(response){ alert('PUT request successful'); });

So the tools for creating and consuming REST web services are steadily improving, while the tools for creating and consuming SOAP web services are over-engineered and IMHO over-rated.

In the meantime, REST makes up in discoverability and navigability what it lacks in automated tooling.

Browsers

Of all our tools for working with HTTP, the most universal is the browser. It's the easiest way to browse a web service API, particularly if it works like the web itself. After all, the URL is just a resource on a server accessible via HTTP, and browsers are specifically designed to make HTTP requests and present the responses to users.

However, like other established HTTP-based tools, most browsers are only good at GET and POST requests, not PUT or DELETE requests. Even then, POST requests generally require an HTML form that the user can fill in and submit.

In addition, most browsers are not good at rendering representations in formats other than HTML or XML.

I use Firefox as my main browser (yes, I'm old-fashioned), and I've discovered a few add-ons that make exploring web APIs a lot easier:

HttpFox - an HTTP analyzer.
JSONView - pretty-prints JSON response objects in the browser window.
Modify Headers - Add, modify and filter the HTTP request headers sent to a web server.
RESTClient - Visit and test REST/WebDav services.

REST is a Spectrum

Ultimately, it makes sense to talk about an API being more or less RESTful and you probably shouldn't kill yourself to reach 100.00000%.

Like anything else, REST purity is subject to diminishing returns. If you get the important stuff correct - URLs are resources, methods are actions, representations include URLs - you'll get to enjoy the main benefits of a REST design approach without tearing your hair out.

For each choice, ask yourself whether the benefit of going more RESTful justifies the cost. Keep in mind that your goal is to make your API as usable and discoverable as possible.

References

Classification of HTTP-based APIs

http://nordsc.com/ext/classification_of_http_based_apis.html
Richardson Maturity Model - A model (developed by Leonard Richardson) that breaks down the principal elements of a REST approach into three steps. These introduce resources, http verbs, and hypermedia controls.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html
REST APIs must be hypertext-driven - Roy Fielding's attempt to get people to understand what he was talking about when he defined REST.

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
RESTful API Design - Pragmatic REST - Webinar by Apigee.

https://www.youtube.com/apigee#p/c/5/R8SIxZVaai4
REST Security Cheat Sheet - Draft document from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
RESTful Web Services: The Basics - IBM developerWorks article

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/
General Principles for Good URI Design - StackOverflow answer

http://stackoverflow.com/a/1619677/682547

Python String Formatting With Dictionaries

2012-01-04T12:00:00Z

My mind is duly blown. I never realized that the traditional printf-style string formatting in Python - the kind that uses the % operator - supports the use of a dictionary as well as a tuple.

The following works:

>>> data = {
    'title': 'Python String Formatting With Dictionaries',
    'author': 'Ryan McGreal',
    'summary': 'In Python, you can use dictionaries instead of tuples to populate values via classic string formatting.',
    'content': '<p>My mind is duly blown...',
    'author_bio': 'Ryan McGreal lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer and writer.',
}

>>> template = """<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>%(title)s</title>
</head>
<body>
<article>
<header>
<hgroup>
<h1>%(title)s</h1>
<h2>By %(author)s</h2>
<h3>%(summary)s</h3>
<hgroup>
</header>
%(content)s
<footer>
%(author_bio)s
</footer>
</article>
</body>
</html>"""

>>> print template % data

As an ultra-lightweight templating engine, this is pretty sweet: it's fast, simple, supports Unicode, and has no third-party dependencies.

Designing a RESTful Web Application

2011-09-30T12:00:00Z

Introduction

I'm working on a couple of projects that involve building a web service, and I decided early on that because of our business constraints - having to communicate with a variety of different systems of varying levels of sophistication - it made sense to keep the web service as simple and accessible as possible.

That pointed me toward designing a RESTful web service that transmits data in a simple format over straight HTTP. After all, just about any programming language imaginable can make an HTTP request. I also decided to go with JSON for the data format, in part because I've been experimenting lately with CouchDB and appreciate both the simplicity and flexibility of JSON and the fact that you can find a JSON parser for any language.

This blog entry is my attempt to get all the concepts of RESTful web service design straight. There's a good chance that some of this information is wrong; and if you notice something, please let me know about it. I'll investigate your argument and update the essay as applicable.

With that in mind, here we go.

Representational State Transfer

Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a model for designing networked software systems based around clients and servers. In a RESTful system, a client makes a request for a resource on a server, and the server issues a response that includes a representation of the resource.

The concept was formalized in 2000 by Roy Fielding, one of the architects of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), about more which below, in his doctoral dissertation. It is not surprising, then, that REST and HTTP mesh very smoothly.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless protocol based on a client requesting a resource across a network and the server providing a response. As such, an HTTP transaction entails a request and a response. The request goes from the client to the server, and the response goes from the server back to the client.

HTTP Requests

An HTTP request has three parts:

The request line, which includes the HTTP method (or "verb"), the uniform resource identifier (URI), and the HTTP version. E.g.

GET /article/1/ HTTP/1.1
One or more optional HTTP headers, which are key/value pairs that characterize the data being requested and/or provided.
An optional message body, which is data being sent from the client to the server as part of the request.

HTTP Responses

An HTTP response also has three parts:

The HTTP status code, indicating the status of the requested URI, e.g.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
One or more optional HTTP headers, which are key/value pairs that characterize the data being provided.
An optional message body, which is the data being returned to the client in response to the request.

Resources

HTTP deals in resources. Each URI points to a resource on the server. Think of URIs as nouns, not verbs, with one URI for each resource.

For example, if you want to add the ability to create an article, it might be tempting to create a URI called /create_article. This is wrong, because it conflates the object (the resource) and the action (creation). Instead, it makes more sense to have a resource called /article and a method that lets you create articles.

HTTP Methods

HTTP defines several methods, or "verbs", to execute on a resource: HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS, CONNECT, and PATCH. However, the following four are most commonly used in web services:

GET Method

To retrieve a resource, issue an HTTP GET request. GET requests are idempotent (see below), which means making a GET request multiple times does not cause any change in the resource that is requested.

GET requests do not include a message body, but GET responses usually do.

POST Method

To submit data to be processed, issue an HTTP POST request. POST requests require a message body, i.e. the data to be processed.

For example, if there is a resource called /article and you want to add a new article, issue a POST request to /article with the content. The server will create a new subsidiary URI under /article - for example, /article/9001 - and assign that URI to the content you sent with your POST request.

Important note: POST requests are not idempotent (see below), meaning multiple POST requests will create multiple resources with unique identifiers.

PUT Method

To place content at an existing resource, issue an HTTP PUT request. For example, if there is a URI /article/9001 and you want to replace the content served at that URI, issue a PUT request to that URI with the new content.

Important note: PUT requests are idempotent, i.e. issuing 1 or 5 or 50 identical PUT requests will have the same effect on the resource. PUT requests must include a message body (the resource to be placed at the URL).

DELETE Method

To remove a resource (and remove its accompanying URI), issue an HTTP DELETE request. DELETE requests should be idempotent, i.e. issuing 1 or 5 or 50 identical DELETE requests will delete exactly one resource. DELETE requests do not require a message body.

Idempotence

This funny-looking word is crucial to designing an effective web service. A request is idempotent if issuing it more than once does not change the resource state beyond issuing it just once. Read that again if you have to.

For example, a DELETE request is idempotent if the first request deletes a resource at a URI, and the second request does nothing because the resource at that URI is already deleted.

For another example, a PUT request is idempotent if the first request updates a resource at a URI, and the second request updates the same resource in the same way at the same URI.

A request is not idempotent if issuing it more than once does change the resource. For example, a POST request to add a comment to a document is not idempotent, if issuing the POST request twice adds the comment twice (so that the document contains two identical comments with separate URLs).

PUT vs. POST

My original understanding of HTTP methods was that you would use PUT to create a resource and POST to update it. This seems in keeping with common sense, but it breaks down when you apply the all-important filter of idempotence.

An interesting discussion on Stack Overflow tackles this issue, but what convinced me to change my mental model was this observation:

POST creates a child resource, so POST to /items creates a resources that lives under the /items resource. Eg. /items/1.

PUT is for creating or updating something with a known URL.

This collision between the inclination to regard PUT as creating and POST as updating is a significant source of confusion about how to well-design a RESTful system, and deserves more attention.

Furthermore, it's tempting to assume that the HTTP verbs line up precisely with the SQL CRUD verbs, but while they're superficially similar, they're not identical. Treating them as such leads to this kind of gotcha.

It's important to keep the logic of HTTP methods separate from the logic of SQL queries, and to develop specialized appropriate logic between the two domains that ensures the data processing on the server produces responses that satisfy the requirements of the HTTP methods (particularly in respect to idempotence).

Conceiving the Web Service: A Resource/Method Table

Again, note well that actions are not mapped to URIs. A resource is an object, a noun, and the action inheres to the HTTP Verb, not to the URI. As a result, the same resource URI can serve different responses (corresponding with different actions) depending on the HTTP Verb.

REST Resource/Action Matrix
Request				Server Action	Response	Idempotent
Resource	Parameters	Method	Data	Server Action	Response	Idempotent
/article		POST	article details	creates a new article	returns confirmation and id	No
/article	/id	GET		gets article details	returns article details	Yes
/article	/id	PUT	new article details	updates article details	returns confirmation and updated article details	Yes
/article	/id	DELETE		deletes an article	returns confirmation of deleted article	Yes

This is the RESTful way to organize a web service: URIs are objects and HTTP Verbs are actions performed on those objects.

HTTP Response Data Formats

Every web server is also a RESTful web service, accepting GET and POST requests to particular resources, and then performing actions and serving data in response.

A conventional web server delivers its data in HTML format (text/html), with related Javascript (text/jss), CSS (text/css) and image files. HTML is an excellent format for marking up textual data for human use, but it has very limited expressive power for structuring data beyond simple documents.

The most common formats used to transmit structured data across HTTP are XML and JSON, with an honourable mention for YAML.

XML

XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a markup (i.e. tag) based syntax based on SGML for formatting structured, text-based data. XML is a format in which to create domain specific markup languages that define particular data structures.

For example, RSS and Atom are XML language standards defined to structure documents published to websites so that the documents can be 'syndicated' to feed readers and third party sites for display.

Likewise, the default underlying structure of Microsoft Office documents since Office 2007 is an XML language called OOXML.

XML structures data by defining elements, properties, data types and allowable nesting rules in an XML schema called a Document Type Definition, or DTD.

A given XML document specifies which DTD schema should define its structure with a Document Type Declaration, or DOCTYPE.

A given XML document can reference multiple DTDs by using namespaces.

Here is a sample XML file containing contact information about a person, taken from Wikipedia.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Person>
    <firstName>John</firstName>
    <lastName>Smith</lastName>
    <age>25</age>
    <address>
        <streetAddress>21 2nd Street</streetAddress>
        <city>New York</city>
        <state>NY</state>
        <postalCode>10021</postalCode>
    </address>
    <phoneNumber type="home">212 555-1234</phoneNumber>
    <phoneNumber type="fax">646 555-4567</phoneNumber>
</Person>

XML must be:

Well-formed - elements are properly nested, tags are properly closed and match case, special characters are escaped, and Unicode characters are encoded; and
Valid - its elements and attributes match the rules defined in the DTD.

An XML Language called XSLT can be used to map XML documents into other markup languages, e.g. HTML.

XML is in wide use in applications that transfer structured data over the internet.

JSON

JSON, or "JavaScript Object Notation", is a lightweight data format introduced in 2001 by Douglas Crockford.

Pronounced "Jason", JSON is based on JavaScript object literal notation, a syntax for creating objects in JavaScript by literally describing their properties and methods. Here is the JSON equivalent to the XML code in the previous section.

{
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "age": 25,
    "address": {
        "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
        "city": "New York",
        "state": "NY",
        "postalCode": "10021"
    },
    "phoneNumber": [
        { "type": "home", "number": "212 555-1234" },
        { "type": "fax", "number": "646 555-4567" }
    ]
 }

While the XML above contained 367 characters (not including indentation), the equivalent JSON contains only 272 characters - only three-quarters as large.

JSON supports lists (ordered sets of values) and dictionaries (unordered collections of key/value pairs) with arbitrary nesting and various data types: number, string, boolean, list, *object and null.

Like XML, JSON is also in wide use in applications that transfer structured data over the internet.

A major advantage over XML is that the syntax is much simpler and less verbose, which makes it lighter across networks as well as more human-readable.

Mature JSON parsers are available for a wide range of programming languages in addition to JavaScript. Python, for example, includes a json parser as part of its standard library (as of version 2.6; earlier versions can use the third-party simplejson library).

A decent JSON parser converts an object back and forth between the programming language's native data types and their JSON equivalents. That way, an application can receive a JSON object, convert it into a native object, process it natively, and then convert the final result back to JSON to be dispatched elsewhere.

YAML

YAML, pronounced to rhyme with "camel", is a recursive acronym meaning "YAML Ain't Markup Language". Whereas JSON is a more minimal data format than XML, YAML takes minimalism to an extreme, eschewing quotation marks, brackets and curly braces altogether in favour of significant indentation and line breaks.

The YAML equivalent to the XML and JSON contact examples above would be:

firstName: John
lastName: Smith
age: 25
address: 
    streetAddress: 21 2nd Street
    city: New York
    state: NY
    postalCode: 10021
phoneNumber: 
    - type: home
      number: 212 555-1234
    - type: fax
      number: 646 555-4567

That works out to just 239 characters - including the significant white space.

REST Best Practices

A RESTful web API ought to be discoverable by its users. One crucial way to do that is by making sure that each resource in your API includes URLs to subsidiary URLs.

Here is an example, using JSON:

{
"articles": 
    [
        {
            "title": "My First Baguette",
            "description": "After a month of reading about how to make baguettes, I finally took the plunge today.",
            "date_published": "2011-07-11",
            "url": "http://quandyfactory.com/blog/81/my_first_baguette"
        },
        {
            "title": "Tenn. Passes Controversial Lawnmower Theft Bill",
            "description": "The lawnmowing industry has successfully lobbied the Tennessee State Government to pass a groundbreaking law making it a criminal offence to loan your lawnmower to a neighbour.",
            "date_published": "2011-06-02",
            "url": "http://quandyfactory.com/blog/78/tenn_passes_controversial_lawnmower_theft_bill"
        }
    ]
}

When you do this, you make it easy for API users to discover your API structure and functionality without having to keep referring to obscure documentation.

Special thanks to Adrian Duyzer for reading a draft of this essay and setting me straight on the respective roles of PUT and POST.

Site-Specific Google Search for Hamilton.ca

2011-09-16T12:00:00Z

The hamilton.ca search engine is awful. Instead, you can do a site-specific google search to find what you're looking for. The following form does this for you:

To do this yourself when searching directly in google, just add the following to your search terms: site:hamilton.ca.

HAMILTON NEXT: Good ideas come from urban focus

2011-09-09T12:00:00Z

Hamilton is a city, not a bedroom community - a real destination for commuters and an important engine of economic development. Seventy per cent of Hamiltonians work in Hamilton, not Toronto or Mississauga. Another 38,000 people commute into the city from a region spanning Niagara, Haldimand-Norfolk and Halton.

A recent study by the Centre for Community Study found that 23,400 people work in the downtown core, earning salaries well above the city and provincial averages. Downtown is already the city's single biggest employment cluster and still has plenty of room to grow.

While our decision makers pin their hopes on "shovel-ready" suburban greenfields, everything we have learned from the study of economic development points to downtown as the place we need to focus for a more prosperous future.

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, explains that innovation emerges from a dense network of connections that provides a context for invention. He describes how new ideas are cobbled together using available parts and concludes, "Chance favours the connected mind."

The environment Johnson is describing is an urban environment. Put simply, cities are the places where people cross paths and exchange ideas, and where "half-formed hunches" can combine into innovations that produce wealth.

When we live and work in urban, mixed-use environments, two important things happen: the per-person cost of public infrastructure goes down, while the rate of innovation speeds up.

It's a two-for-one productivity boost, and it's due to the distinctly urban economies of density, scale and association.

Density brings destinations together, reducing travel costs and making activities more affordable. Scale gives us bigger markets so the fixed cost of production goes down per unit of output. Density and scale bring people into frequent contact, and that association gives us the networks of "connected minds" that result in an innovation boom.

For these reasons, Hamilton must make urban revitalization its number own growth priority. The alternative of continued suburban development doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for the infrastructure that is needed to service it.

Each new subdivision actually increases the city's net liabilities. And as the urban boundary expands, more distant suburbs are even more expensive to service.

Council just voted to increase development charges by 2013, but the city will still charge only 60 per cent of what it is allowed to collect - even 100 per cent would not actually cover the full cost of development.

We have been running this pyramid scheme for decades, paying for yesterday's expansion with tomorrow's. As a result, our existing infrastructure idles while we spend money we don't have to build more infrastructure that can't pay for itself.

Our regulatory system reinforces this focus on sprawl at the expense of urban investment. The Zoning By-Law encourages low density, single-use development while actively obstructing adaptive reuse and intensification.

Even a modest infill project can face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for building permits, setback variances, cash-in-lieu-of-parkland (that can only be used to build new parks in the suburbs), mandatory parking requirements, zoning variances for any use not explicitly listed in the zoning for that building, and development charges - even though the infrastructure the building will use is already built.

The new Official Plan fixes some of these issues, but it will be mired in Ontario Municipal Board appeals for years. Meanwhile, the city continues to suffocate slowly under the current rules.

We can move faster with an investment-friendly secondary plan (particularly along our east-west B-Line corridor) that establishes a dense urban form primed for mixed use. City staff are already working with businesses downtown on an intensification study that will address the major barriers to reinvestment.

We must also commit to building the proposed east-west light rail transit line. The evidence is clear: LRT anchors new private investment and intensifies land use, increasing tax assessments and infrastructure productivity. It attracts residents and signals a city's long-term commitment to the area, which gives developers the confidence to invest.

City staff have prepared a detailed inventory of development opportunities along the LRT corridor and the potential is staggering. If Hamilton's LRT performs similarly to other cities, we could see a billion dollars in new investments and tens of millions a year in new tax assessments.

The province has said if it approves LRT, it will cover 100 per cent of the direct capital cost. The city will have to contribute some money - the amount is still being negotiated - but the cost of not building LRT is a steady erosion in our finances as the city's unfunded infrastructure liabilities get worse and worse.

An urban focus doesn't mean an end to our suburbs. Rather, it means we need an economic engine that generates enough wealth to pay for those suburbs. As Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut famously said, "You can't be a suburb of nothing."

This essay was published in the Hamilton Spectator on Wednesday, July 20, 2011.

My First Baguette

2011-07-11T12:00:00Z

I got up at 5:00 AM this morning to make baguette. First of all, I made a poolish, which is a pre-ferment made from flour, yeast and water. I made this batch and left it on the printer in the basement to rise slowly over the day.

Fresh poolish set to ferment on our basement printer

I came home after work to a mature bowl of poolish that had the consistency of the sticky goo that kids get in an egg-shaped plastic container and which invariably ends up getting ground into the carpet, staining the cushions and stuck to the cat's hair.

The poolish after 12 hours of fermenting

Close-up of the fermented poolish

I mixed up a batch of dough using the poolish, more flour, water, yeast and salt, and kneaded it for around 15 minutes. I coated the dough in oil, put it in a covered bowl and left it to rise for an hour or so.

Once it had risen, I split it into four pieces, pre-shaped them into ovals, wrapped them in cellophane and left them for another twenty minutes.

Then I unwrapped them, rolled them out into baguettes, and arranged them in a makeshift couche, or "bed", which is supposed to be a heavy linen cloth that keeps the loaves in shape as they undergo their second fermentation.

My makeshift couche, a red hand towel that turned out to be rather on the sticky side

I ran into trouble getting the loaves out of the couche and onto the pan, as they tended to stick to the material, even though I had floured it beforehand. As a result, one of the loaves ended up looking rather like that bulbous Orc Lieutenant from the Return of the King movie.

In any case, I cranked the oven to 450 degrees and added a pan of water for steam. As the oven heated up, I wondered what the hell I was thinking baking in the middle of July - "hell" being the operative word. (Note to self: next time, hold off on learning to bake a new kind of bread until September.)

I baked the loaves for around 25 minutes. When they came out, the one looked like an orc but the best looking one looked almost like an actual baguette.

Four cooked baguettes, at least one of which actually looks like a baguette

Finally, the baguettes cooled and I was ready for my first taste test. I served myself a slice with brie de meaux and some red pepper confit. It did not taste quite right, but is certainly better than I expected.

The taste test: fresh baguette with brie and red pepper confit

More experiments to follow in the near future!

Tenn. Passes Controversial Lawnmower Theft Bill

2011-06-02T12:00:00Z

From Yahoo! News:

The lawnmowing industry has successfully lobbied the Tennessee State Government to pass a groundbreaking law making it a criminal offence to loan your lawnmower to a neighbour.

The practice of lawnmowersharing is claimed, according to an industry-funded study, to cost the industry $10 billion a year in lost revenue.

"Now that everyone who wants to enjoy a mowed lawn has to come clean and buy or rent their own lawnmower, we can finally put an end to the harmful piracy that has been driving the lawnmowing industry to the brink of collapse," said Dr. Lawrence Angelo, an industry spokesperson.

The barbecue industry is watching this closely as it attempts to secure passage of a law that would uphold barbecue terms-of-use restrictions preventing barbecue owners from flagrantly cooking food for dinner guests without a multi-user licence.

Solitaire

2011-04-04T12:00:00Z

This is a version of solitaire I hacked up using HTML, CSS, javascript with jQuery, jQUery-UI draggable, the Noisy jQuery plugin, and only one small image. It's pretty nasty, but I wanted to get a feel for the draggable jquery-UI functionality.

Demo: http://quandyfactory.com/static/solitaire/solitaire.html

Source: https://github.com/quandyfactory/Solitaire

URL Shortener

2011-01-10T12:00:00Z

I whipped up a quick utility to shorten URLs using the Google URL Shortener API:

http://quandyfactory.com/shorturl

You can read the source code on Github:

Light rail delivers investment

2010-11-24T12:00:00Z

As the public debate over light rail transit (LRT) in Hamilton heats up, I've noticed a big conceptual difference between people who support the initiative and those who oppose it.

The common sentiment running through opponents is: Why would we spend more than necessary to provide rapid transit? LRT costs three times as much as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) to build but won't provide three-times-better transit service.

If moving people were the only - or even the main - objective of a rapid transit system, I would agree completely. I'm as eager as anyone to hold the line on my property tax bill.

The thing is, LRT is only incidentally about moving people around. Its more ambitious purpose is to transform the city's relationship between land use and transportation.

LRT doesn't just get people from here to there and leave everything else static. It provides an anchor around which Hamilton can attract billions of dollars in new private investment - investment into dense, mixed urban uses that make downtown more valuable.

Hamilton is currently stuck in automobile-path dependence. We design our neighbourhoods around the car, which pushes destinations far apart and makes car ownership necessary. High car ownership, in turn, increases pressure to design our neighbourhoods around the car.

LRT breaks us out of that path dependence. Designing neighbourhoods around rapid transit brings many destinations close together and reduces the need to drive everywhere. A family with two cars can give one of them up. A family with one car can leave it at home more often and experience city living at its best.

It's easy to dismiss this as pie-in-the-sky optimism, but we have hard numbers from cities across North America and around the world proving that LRT really does attract the investment Hamilton needs.

When a city builds LRT and streamlines the regulatory investment process inside the area planners call the "transit-oriented development corridor" - a walkable stretch of land about half a kilometre to either side of the line - the return on investment is impressive.

For every dollar the city invests in building LRT, developers invest up to $10. That translates into real, sustained growth in the city's property tax base, and on a building form that makes the most efficient use of public infrastructure - unlike low-density sprawl, which requires kilometres of new roads, water and sewer lines.

Metrolinx, the provincial body co-ordinating rapid transit investment across the GTA and Hamilton, recognizes this. In its Benefits Case Analysis for Hamilton's east-west B-Line, Metrolinx highlighted the value of LRT in increasing investment and boosting economic development.

BRT, in contrast, attracts only minimal private sector investment. While some people argue that LRT is fixed and therefore inflexible, this is actually a strength. It tells developers the city is committed to a long-term investment in urban revitalization.

BRT is just too easy to reroute, reschedule or cancel. At its most full-featured, it's not much cheaper than LRT to build, but has higher per-passenger operating costs. In both cases, it leaves developers unimpressed.

Len Brandup, the transportation director for Kenosha, Wis., put it best: "Streetcars have sex appeal. It resonates with folks. ... Developers don't write cheques for buses."

This helps to explain why the Realtors' Association of Hamilton-Burlington heartily endorsed LRT. As the association stated: "We believe that light rail is one of the best ways to achieve ... revitalization of the downtown core, intensification along main corridors, increased economic development and broadening of the tax base."

As residents, commercial businesses and employers start to cluster around the LRT network, downtown Hamilton starts to transform from a hollowed-out, underinvested pass-through for suburban drivers into a real centre that attracts both investment and people, and generates steadily rising property tax assessments.

Clustering matters. The innovations that will drive tomorrow's economy will grow out of dense networks of well-connected researchers, developers, entrepreneurs and investors sharing and cross-fertilizing ideas. By promoting high-quality density, LRT will help set Hamilton up as a future economic growth node.

Similarly, decades of economic research tells us young, small businesses disproportionately generate tomorrow's jobs - the kinds of businesses created by people seeking the high-quality density that LRT promotes.

Hamilton needs LRT. For too long we have been a city without a centre, and the result is expensive, distributed infrastructure costs carried disproportionately by residential taxpayers.

Even if you never come downtown and have no intention of ever setting foot on LRT, you should still support light rail in Hamilton - if only because a lively, economically healthy downtown means less pressure on your property tax bill.

And who knows: After a few years of watching the core spring back to life, you might even decide to come down and find out what all the excitement is about.

Originally published in the Hamilton Spectator on November 24, 2010