After yesterday’s screencast showing the use of coffeeshop from the command line, here’s one that expands upon the direction I’m taking the implementation, following the REST/HTTP philosophy. It shows, I hope, that embracing REST-orientated HTTP features, such as content negotiation (“conneg”), and the concepts of resources and representations, gives you a fantastically flexible and straightforward application protocol to work with and be guided by. (I’m not doing full-blown conneg, that will come later. But what I am doing works well for me).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhAWH2-Quuk

In this shorter screencast, I continue on from where I left off — viewing the message detail resource in the web browser. I use conneg to request that same resource in JSON instead of HTML, and show how the JSON representation can be easily parsed, and the data reused, further along the pipeline.