This month's meeting will be a roundtable discussion about modern web serving.

The CGI.pl/ODBC era gave way to LAMP and we're now onto the next generation:

• node.js and NoSQL make LAMP overkill for many situations

• AJAX/JavaScript are moving much application logic to the browser

• Apache is giving way to lighttpd, node.js, nginx and others

• We've gone from 9" Mac support to 1024 X 768 and now to 4" phones

• URL Shorteners. Who would have thought?

• Users now routinely block ads, scripting and Flash

• Apple has declared war on Flash!

• HTML 5 and CSS 3 are starting to appear in the wild

• Security is finally coming first, not last

How have these factors changed the way you serve web content?

Are the fundamental problems being solved and making your job easier?

Please share your experiences at this roundtable and bring your questions.

When: Tuesday, September 20th, 7PM

Where: Free Geek: 1731 SE 10th Avenue, not far from the Lucky Lab

Food and Drink: Bring your own, consider Lucky Lab take-out

Open Data and Interoperability by Arlo Belshee

Lots of us want to expose our data via RESTful web APIs. We also want to consume data exposed via such APIs. REST + Json works well for this. However, we'd also like to mash up multiple data sources and build higher level tools. For example, it would be nice to create Business Intelligence (BI) tools that can point to any API and start charting the data, or create JavaScript control libraries that can be bound directly to data sources.

Unfortunately, that isn't possible with just REST + Json.

The problem is that each service is custom. No two services follow exactly the same rules. Sure, everything exposes sets of resources. But how do you get from a resource to its related resources? How do you ask the server to tell you about related resources? What, exactly should the server do when it gets a PATCH verb? Each server interprets these differently, which prevents making general tools.

I'm going to talk about the OData protocol. This is an open standard that defines uniform semantics and modeling for RESTful web services. I'll show how this allows general tools to be built, and data from multiple sources to be combined together in interesting ways - without requiring custom code for each server. I'll also show how this enables people working in different languages. A single library can be written for each language which can then support all OData-compliant RESTful web services.

Most of the examples will be with open source frameworks and tools, but I'll also show ways that you can use OData to break out data that is trapped in closed-source systems and expose it to the open source ecosystem.

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:30 Business We will discuss the status of our ongoing projects including PLUG's monthly Advanced Topics meetings, PLUG's monthly hands on clinics etc.

7:30 - 8:30 Presentation and Questions

See above

9:00 - ... Beer The Lucky Lab Northwest Beer Hall 1945 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon

Full details: https://www.meetup.com/pdxnode/events/241731900/

Our incredible speakers for PDXNode August edition are Suz Hinton (@noopkat), and Bret Comnes (@uhhyeahbret)!

Suz will talk about machine learning in Node, and Bret will be share about the amazing choojs frontend framework & choo6 release! (choo.io)