One day at the WS-REST workshop in Florence

I am really excited to write this article. I indeed had a wonderful time participating both as a presenter as well as an attendee for my first ever ws-rest workshop which is collocated each year with the famous WWW conference.

The program was full of interesting topics, regarding (what else) discussions about REST practices, research and new ideas.
I am borrowing its description here!

Web APIs for a Web in evolution
The Web is changing at a tremendous speed, and Web APIs play an important part in that. In fact, the number of Web APIs is growing so quickly that we face many challenges.
The WS-REST workshop series aim to connect Web researchers and engineers to tackle the issues we are facing. Many of them are not solved by far:

• How to dynamically integrate Web APIs?

• How to create intelligent clients for Web APIs?

• How can we deal with the enormous growth and diversity?

Session 1

First, to kick start the session, Erik Wilde had the floor for a super interesting keynote. His presentation is available online, and it is a great place of inspiration for future discussions, talks or even call-for-papers (if you are in academia).

Erik Wilde talking at the keynote

After the keynote, Tobias Fertig presented his paper, "Model-driven Testing of RESTful APIs". It was a nice approach on testing and close to Erik's close quote that,"We need better testing to make REST ecosystems more robust".

Then it was the coffee break at the central main area of the conference.

Session 2

In session two, there were three papers focusing more on the Hypermedia nature of REST as well in the semantics of it.

The first paper by Junjie Feng and Aaron Harwood, "BrowserCloud: A Personal Cloud for Browser Session Migration and Management" presented a controversial approach to client-server relationship.
The second paper was presented by the APIacademy architect Ronnie Mitra and it was about "Sketching a Better Web API". It was indeed a great overview about designing APIs and finally he presented a super nice tool for quick prototyping with APIs. This tool is available as open source by APIacademy.
The third and final paper, "Towards Optimising the Data Flow in Distributed Application" by Felix Leif Keppmann and Maria Maleshkova, gave some interesting insights on distributed applications.

Session 3

This session started with our presentation!

The title is:, "Adding Rules on Existing Hypermedia APIs" and the authors are myself (Michael Petychakis), Fenareti Lampathaki and Dimitrios Askounis. You can find the slides available at slideshare. The main topic of my presentation was to discuss our latest work on the area about blending web rules with existing hypermedia standards to create a new media type for applications based on the semantic web and linked data.

Not my finest moment and there was something wrong with the JSON

Then, the final paper of the day was titled, "An approach to support data integrity for web services using semantic RESTful interfaces" by  Hermano Albuquerque Lira, José Renato Villela Dantas,  Bruno de Azevedo Muniz, Tadeu Matos Nunes and Pedro Porfírio Muniz Farias.

Closing Discussions

After a day full of discussions and nice presentations, the chairs of the workshop
Thomas Steiner and Carlos Pedrinaci initiated the discussion about future directions and maybe the next call for papers.

I cannot remember all of them, but some that I have written down are as follows:

• focus on client instead of only showcasing server implementations
• find better scenarios to demonstrate on research

Since I am missing a looooot from the day, you can always find more in the hashtag of the event #wsrest or the twitter account of the workshop, @wsrest.
My only regret is that I could not meet more guys from the Hydra Community, specially with
Markus Lanthaler and Ruben Verborgh. Hopefully next year! I have to admit though that there were many many Hydra references and discussions!

The REST is now Florence!

After the wonderful day, I could not stop myself visiting Florence!

See you all next year in Montreal!!