Web landscape is changing rapidly; while AJA[X|J] was an improvement from the user interface responsiveness standpoint, the underlying data transport mechanism was still based on the request/response polling model. WebSocket specification removed the last obstacle for a seamless, event-driven data pushing from storage to the non-proprietary HTML5 user interface. Data transports naturally calling for event-driven model can now be implemented in a straightforward and standard fashion, improving performance by significantly lowering the network and web server overhead of the request/response model. Using POCO framework Net library, an HTTP server generating WebSocket HTML5 page will be built. Next, we’ll use POCO Data library to add SQL database communication capabilities to the server and establish a callback hook; the hook opens the path for database modifications to transparently trigger web page changes. The solution building blocks, Poco::Dynamic module for datatype erasure and Poco::Data::RowFormatter class for dynamic output formatting, will be explained in detail. The session offers a practical solution to few acute problems – delivering data from storage over the network to the web end-user seamlessly, efficiently and independently from transported data types.

RESTful API’s can be a powerful way to expose data and services to a broad range of platforms, but just what does it mean to be RESTful? What’s the rest of the story on why REST is an important tool for developers building services in today’s world? This talk introduces you to the REST architectural style and looks at what it means to be a truly RESTful service. I’ll show you concrete examples of using the ASP.NET Web API framework to create simple RESTful services quickly, as well ways to address issues that, while not specifically addressed by REST, are real-world problems that you will encounter when building RESTful services.