RubyConf 2008: Lightweight Web Services

Tired of web apps written in Ruby being big, slow, and complex? Then try subdividing your problem space by slicing up your app into a set of lightweight web services.

In this talk, Adam Wiggins, author of the RestClient rubygem, and Blake Mizerany, author of the Sinatra microframework, will introduce you to these lean-and-mean tools and show you that Ruby web apps can indeed be small, fast, and memory-efficient.

Then we'll show how lightweight web services, communicating with each other via REST calls, can be assembled into a larger software system. Using real-world examples from Heroku, we'll show how a service-based architecture has the potential to be more scalable, more maintainable,
and just more fun than a monolithic one.

About Adam Wiggins & Blake Mizerany
Blake Mizerany is the author of Sinatra, a developer at Heroku, and a hell of a guy. He's spoken at events such as Rubyfringe 2008.

Adam Wiggins is the author of RestClient, a cofounder of Heroku, and a total bad-ass. He's spoken at events such as Railsconf 2008.