C/D/H Talks Tech

Author:

Doug Brower

I have been in the IT industry for 18 years and have been a consultant with C/D/H for over 13 years.

I am most excited about using technology that goes beyond best case installation to develop solutions and solve problems for clients. My most exciting projects are developing identity management and single sign on solutions and working with various Microsoft SharePoint technologies.

When I’m not working, I spend a lot of time with my wife and four kids. We enjoy sports and activities, camping and the outdoors. I spend whatever time is left running or reading a good book.

I like to say with my busy career and family, that I’m smack-dab in the middle of my life.

More about Doug
Articles by Doug Brower

I was fortunate to have been counted among the 7400 plus attendees of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 two weeks ago.  The conference was simply incredible in its wealth of information.  Microsoft is making huge leaps forward in all of the Office and Office Server products.  Not only is every product getting more feature rich, but there are a large number of pivotal technologies buried in the mix.

One of these technologies is Microsoft’s adoption of the RESTful architecture.  REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style; a set of guidelines for working with objects in the client-server model by using existing protocols (HTTP, for instance).  Obviously, Microsoft is implementing REST in SharePoint, using the HTTP protocol.  In SharePoint 2010, objects and data items are each addressable via a unique URL and can be acted on by the standard HTTP verbs: GET, PUT, DELETE, and POST.  SharePoint rules for validation and access control apply to each call.

Examples of REST in action are using only HTTP commands to query SharePoint lists and delete, update or add list items.  For example, since Excel Services exposes Excel documents, there is an Excel Services REST handler that can allow a user or application to perform the same actions against Excel workbooks, ranges and cells.  The following is a template of the standard URL syntax for working with the Excel Services REST handler. Starting with this template, you can build a URL to list, add, change or delete workbook content.  Presentation directives can also be appended to the URL to filter, sort, page and perform other operations on the data as it is returned.

 So what and who cares?

It took me a longer than most, but I finally realized the importance of this architecture.  We now have an additional API for working with SharePoint.  JSON (JavaScript) and other code can call into SharePoint and return or manipulate data, which is often easier than using Web Services or the SharePoint object model.  This means more rapid development of data rich applications by analysts and architects, rather than by hard-core .NET developers.  If you’re not sick of the term ‘mashup’ yet, you will be.