ETags and Optimistic Concurrency Control

Feb 16, 2013

I last wrote about ETags in context of Conditional GETs, which allow a server to see if a resource has been modified since the last time a client checked. If it has not been modified, the server can return a 304 Not Modified response.

API development: ETags and Conditional Get

Feb 10, 2013

My curiosity about ETags (Entity Tags) was first piqued when reading over Github's API documentation. Looking into them, I saw that there explanation often pointed to them as a "cacheing" mechanism.

Error Handling with Content Negotiation

Feb 05, 2013

In looking to build a RESTful API, an important consideration is how to handle errors. Most errors are displayed to users in HTML, as these are web applications. However, API's need some special care.

Laravel 4: Where to put bindings

Jan 27, 2013

If you make judicious use of IoC containers (and Dependency Injection), you'll likely end up with lots of Bindings, some of which may look like:

Laravel 4 Request/Response Lifecycle

Jan 22, 2013

Laravel encapsulates HTTP requests and responses within PHP objects. As you likely know, the HTTP core of Laravel revolves around Symfony's HTTPFoundation component.

Laravel 4 Error Handling

Jan 21, 2013

Laravel uses Exceptions for error handling. This includes both HTTP error codes and application (run-time) errors.

Ubuntu for Phones

Jan 03, 2013

Ubuntu has an OS targeted for smart phones. After my initial excitement at the prospect of having an OS I could really nerd out on (Really hoping for a Terminal app), I realized one thing: I don't use any of Ubuntu's graphical tools.

The switch to Google Enterprise

Jan 03, 2013

Last week, during our break, we switched from a hosted Exchange service to Google Enterprise. The main driver to change was lack of space - some of us have emails going back 7 years and have accrued many gigabytes of data. Adding more available space was getting too costly.