Category: Software Architecture

CloudDays™ Quick Start – Designing Your RESTful API Part 1: The Nouns

January 12, 2015

imageEverything is a resource in REST. As you learned in Choosing Between RESTful Web Service, SOAP, Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style or design pattern for creating web services which allow anything connected to a network to something else on the network using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

In this post, you will learn the how to define your resource identifier. In the following post, you will learn how to use the HTTP verbs and response codes. And along the way you will learn many of the principles of a good RESTful API.

Let me second what As Thomas Hunter II writes:

The easier your API is to consume, the more people that will consume it.

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CloudDays™ Quick Start – Choosing Between RESTful Web Service, SOAP

January 9, 2015

imageRepresentational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style or design pattern for creating web services which allow anything connected to a network to something else on the network using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Typically we think of a RESTful Web Service as one that will get and set data. It works a lot the same way as a web page, but your user doesn’t see the data until it’s time to be displayed.

REST principles are based on the same underlying principles that govern the Web. Those principles are:

  • User agents interact with resources, and resources are anything that can be named and represented. Each resource can be addressed via a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
  • Interaction with resources (located through their unique URIs) is accomplished using a uniform interface of the HTTP standard verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE). Also important in the interaction is the declaration of the resource’s media type, which is designated using the HTTP Content-Type header. (XHTML, XML, JPG, PNG, and JSON are some well-known media types.)
  • Resources are self-descriptive. All the information necessary to process a request on a resource is contained inside the request itself (which allows services to be stateless).
  • Resources contain links to other resources (hyper-media).

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Azure – 24 Must Know Cloud Patterns With Sample Code

January 8, 2015

azurecloudYour application may start with a single idea as a single website. It will often have a website, some business logic tied to a database. Those stand alone applications have a way of adding features.

Or your application may want to be “cloud ready” from the beginning. The vision may begin with a set of servers, each doing a specific task, each that can be scalable to meet demand, provide reliability. As soon as you take that second step, it’s time to look to well known practices.

Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team has put together architectural guidance to help you design your cloud applications,  Cloud Design Patterns: Prescriptive Architecture Guidance for Cloud Applications. Each pattern is provided in a common format that describes the context and problem, the solution, issues and considerations for applying the pattern, and an example based on Azure.

It also discusses the benefits and considerations for each pattern. Most of the patterns have code samples or snippets that show how to implement the patterns using the features of Microsoft Azure.

Although the guidance helps you adopt Azure, the patterns are relevant to all kinds of distributed systems, whether or not they are  hosted on Azure or on other cloud platforms.

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Microsoft Introduces New Modular .NET Core Delivered by NuGet, Source on GitHub

December 8, 2014

Big changes are coming to the .NET platform that affect your development wherever you use .NET. The direction helps you develop applications (Web, Azure, Phone, Desktop. Windows Store, Linux, MacOS, iOs and Android) easier. So if you are going horizontal and targeting more than one variation of Windows, then this is for you.

For developers and architects, it provides keys to a new way to looking at how your code should be written. The new .NET implements the kinds of features we face every day. And the solutions are evolving from vertical solutions where each problem was a subset of some other bigger problem. Rather it becomes a set of contracts, where dependencies are clearly defined, where the contract can be implemented in different ways to meet specific needs.

Migrating the .NET base is no small task. Yet, the Microsoft teams have taken on the challenge to make it easier to build applications across platforms — and not just Microsoft platforms.

The new direction includes:

This post boils down what these changes mean to developers and architects. And what it means to your code today. I’ve selected key passages from Introducing .NET Core. But you will also want to dig more into the article and watch as features are rolled out.

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Single Page Apps – Notes on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

July 9, 2014

imageOne of my readers has mentioned that there are issues regarding search engine optimization (SEO) for single page apps. Because content is dynamically loaded via JavaScript calls rather than as part of the initial page load, search engine crawlers won’t see all the content.

Let me explain.

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Object JavaScript – Using Infuser to Asynchronously Load Your Templates

April 30, 2014

imageIn Introduction to Templates in MVVM Using Knockout.js, Mustache, you learned how you can use templates to a display and interact with Knockoutjs. But what if you would like to reuse those templates? Would you like to be able to load the templates asynchronously? And would you like to use the same techniques to load templates that could be using in Knockout, underscore and jquery-tmpl?

Jim Cowart wrote infuser to provide a “generic-ized” utility that could interface with a given template engine and handle the fetching of templates from a remote resource.

This means you can put your template content in a folder so you can reuse it in multiple places. If your template engine expects your templates to be in SCRIPT tags, you don’t have to lose syntax highlighting, etc. in your IDE – you can still place them in their own files with a valid markup extension .

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Object JavaScript – Introduction to Templates in MVVM Using Knockout.js, Mustache

April 29, 2014

knockoutYou can use template feature in Knockoutjs to render your data. Templates are a straight forward way to build complex UI structure, often with repeating or nested blocks. You can use templates to show repeating data, such as data in tables or portfolios.

From the point of view of Object JavaScript, templates help you further separate out the code that gets and sets the data, from the code that renders the data. Templates provide you a way to reuse similar views throughout your application. And they help you isolate the view that deals with data in a way that you can find and understand in your own code.

Templates as they are used in this post, are reusable chunks of HTML that relate to your observables in Knockout.

There are two main ways of using templates:

  • Native templating where you use foreach, if, with and other control bindings. The control flow bindings use the HTML markup in your element and render against your data. The feature is built into Knockout.
  • String-based templating connects Knockout to third-party template engine, such as jQuery Templates, MustacheJS, or underscore.

In this post, you will learn the basics of using templates in your HTML application using JavaScript.

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Object JavaScript – Dynamic UI Using Observables with MVVM Using Knockout.js

April 25, 2014

knockoutIn our previous posts, you learned how to build modules. In the next series of posts, you will learn how you can connect up modules to the user interface. You will learn, step by step how to use observables for your user interface to dynamically update itself.

Knockout.js makes it easier to create rich, responsive UIs with JavaScript. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), KO can help you implement it more simply and maintainable.

Knockout helps you build rich client-side interactivity by using an MVVM-like (Model, View, and ViewModel) pattern. It does this by helping you separate the UI behavior and the data structures. To do this, you will use declarative bindings with observable data.

Knockout is free, open source, and available for your projects using the MIT License.

Knockout helps you:

  • Synchronize JSON models with HTML elements using Observable Properties.
  • Synchronize arrays, using Observable Arrays.
  • Provide calculated properties using Computed Properties.

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Object JavaScript – Revealing Modular Pattern Into Asynchronous Modules

April 21, 2014

image6[1]Let’s put our revealing module pattern into asynchronous modules definition (AMD).

Asynchronous module definition (AMD) is a JavaScript API for defining modules such that the module and its dependencies can be asynchronously loaded. It is useful in improving the performance of websites by bypassing synchronous loading of modules along with the rest of the site content.

modular, we generally mean it’s composed of a set of highly decoupled, distinct pieces of functionality stored in modules. As you probably know, loose coupling facilitates easier maintainability of apps by removing dependencies where possible.

Loose coupling implies each component can operate or be tested independently of other components.

Tight coupling implies each component “knows” the details or inner workings of other components.

In just a few lines of code you can provide for architectural features above to improve from revealing module pattern to asynchornous module definition code. Here’s a look into why and how.

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