Dream access control
Just finished an
article over on the
MindTouch blog about tweaking Dream's default access patterns. I really like how Dream uses cookies, something you don't often see in REST services. Generally it's all about
X-My-Cool-Auth-Header business, which is yet another manual burden for developers. Not sure if this originated because people did raw http requests and either didn't know that most http request mechanisms have cookie support (even curl has a cookie jar), or whether it was a dislike of cookies.
The article also briefly touches on Prologues and Epilogues, a topic I need go into with more detail some time in the future. Basically every Feature call can have n pre and post actions that can do anything from checking authentication to mutating the request (think accepting data in json or Xml and having a prologue and epilogue do transformations on the way in and out so that the feature itself doesn't have to worry about the data format but can assume that it always gets Xml. The system kind of reminds me of apache handler chaining from mod_perl.
Labels: c#, dream, mindtouch, rest
Dream for REST and async
I've been doing a lot of work inside of
MindTouch Dream as of late over at
MindTouch and i'm really digging it. Steve's put together an awesome framework for doing asynchronous programming on .NET and for being able to treat all access as RESTful resources in your server side code.
Now, coming from a very Dependency Injection heavy design philosophy, Dream has been a bit of an adjustment for me, but the capabilities of Dream, especially the coroutine approach for dealing with requests, is very powerful and fairly intuitive, once you get your head around it.
In an effort to ease the Dream learning curve and cement my understanding of the code base, I'll be blogging articles about it as I go along, and cross-posting them to the MindTouch developer wiki as well. My first article was a continuation of Steve's Asynchronicity library series, this one about coroutines (read: yield) in Dream.
I've been using the C# Web Server project for my REST work up until recently, but I'm currently in the process of migrating it over to Dream. It just removes all the legwork and fits much better into the async workflow of the rest of notify.me.
Clearly I am biased, but seriously, if you need to build REST interfaces in .NET, Dream beats anything you can roll on your own in a reasonable amount of time, and definitely is about 1000% more powerful than trying to force WCF down the REST or even POX path.
Labels: async programming, c#, dream, mindtouch, rest
