Despite missing December and January, February's PDX Django meeting looks like a great one. We have one short and one medium talk scheduled -- if you'd like to do a 5 minute or so talk on a tool, problem, or feature, why not let us know?

It's also the day before PyCon starts, so we might just chat about what looks interesting there.

The talks:

• Dermot Maty on a problem he had with Proxy Models, and how he solved it

• Michael Richardson will be previewing a talk he's giving at DjangoSki. Here's the summary from their talks page:

"Michael is a cofounder at Urban Airship where he spends his day working on a RESTful API to deliver notifications and in-app content to mobile devices. His talk, "RESTful APIs with Django and Piston," pulls from Urban Airship's experience and goes through creating an API in Django with Piston along with pitfalls you may experience along the way.

Michael was also the developer behind the massive Django-powered meat conglomerate bacn.com until it was sold earlier this year. Bac'n did not, sadly, have an API."

The meeting will be at 7pm at PIE, 1227 NW Davis St (directly opposite the North Face store -- look for the big brown armchairs in the window.

This month's topic: Production-Ready Web Services with Dropwizard

Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. The library was developed at Yammer and has been adopted by Simple (formerly BankSimple) and the Gilt Groupe. We will discuss how Gilt is using Dropwizard and why we adopted the library.

Speaker: Sean Sullivan

Sean is a software engineer specializing in e-commerce systems, web services development, and mobile applications. Sean works on back-office applications at the Gilt Groupe and has contributed to various open source projects, including the OAuth Java library and OpenID4Java.

PJUG meetings start with some time to eat and socialize (pizza and beverages are provided), followed by the featured speaker, then Q&A, discussion, sometimes a drawing to give away swag. :)

Though we like knowing how many people to expect, you don't have to RSVP, on Upcoming or otherwise. Go ahead and just show up!

Many people also go for a drink and further discussion following the meeting, typically at a nearby location determined ad hoc.

http://twitter.com/pjug http://pjug.org/ (join our mailing list, linked from the website!)

Rest Services with JAX-RS and Jersey

This talk covers using JAX-RS and Jersey to create REST services for embedded system. It covers the basic of JAX-RS and then moves into using Jackson for JSON encoding and using the streaming API to reduce memory footprint for using REST API in embedded systems.

Speaker

Brian Mason holds a Masters in Comp Science from Univ of IL. He has been developing for 25 years and currently works as developer at Netapp Inc.

Come join us for Pythonic talks!

All levels are welcome! Talk levels vary from beginner to advanced.

This month:

• Development of fast responding websites with Django, Angular.js and REST by Hannes Hapke

• Reverse Q&A with Rob Bednark

Join us afterward at Rogue on NW 14th & Flanders to continue the discussion over a beverage.

RSVP at Meetup

Join us on our python.org mailing list and in #pdxpython on Freenode. All are welcome!

Hyped for Hyperfit

Bodybuilding.com just spent the last year moving their commerce platform to a RESTful architecture, centered around the new Commerce Hyper API that drives the Mobile Native App experiences. A few interesting artifacts were created during this endeavor, some which will be open sourced in the coming months. One of these, Hyperfit, is library for consuming the resources & hypermedia controls of RESTful Applications & Hypermedia APIs inspired by Retrofit. The session will consist of two parts:

• An overview on RESTful Application Architecture
• Some coding with Hyperfit to consume & navigate a selection of Hypermedia APIs

Speaker

Chris DaMour has been with Bodybuilding.com for over a year as lead architect on the Commerce Hypermedia API. @drdamour / https://github.com/drdamour

Lightning Talks

Dynamic scalability using AWS Lambda

How does Bodybuilding.com handle spikes in image upload traffic? Instead of attempting to predict load and have resources available for peak load, we are moving to the AWS Lambda service in order to dynamically scale our image processing functions. This will allow us to meet peak load and to reduce cost.

Speaker

Whitney Hunter has been a software developer for 27 years. Over the last 15 years, he has been primarily focused on server side API development on the Java platform.

Client side HATEOAS

Client side programming for HAL+JSON is flexible and extendable. Individual UI components are created server side and displayed via links. This architecture allows for code reuse and rapid application updates.

Speaker

Zachary Heusinkveld has been building client side applications for 7 years in enterprise and commercial spaces on Android, iOS, Windows and mobile web.

Testing REST: Functional Correctness At Scale Using AKKA and REST Assured

This month's speaker is Steve Hall who has 20 years of experience designing and delivering unique solutions to business problems. Steve is a Lead Software Engineer working with REST, big data and social solutions at Nike in Beaverton, OR.

His current project enables millions of users on mobile devices to follow and just as easily stop following any digital content that may be of interest to them. The team has found that building these systems using REST and NOSQL can scale massively. However, achieving that scale requires some unique approaches for handling the volumes of data that needs to be stored. Tonight he will present an overview of what the team has learned about data modeling in a typical NOSQL datastore such as Cassandra or Dynamo. Following that he will discuss why traditional unit, integration, and performance testing approaches proved to be inadequate, and why the team went looking for a better solution.

Having presented the problem, he will then present how the team has applied AKKA and Rest Assured to create a testing framework that proves the system is functionally correct at scale, and why it matters.

Finally, he will close with a few insights for other ways that AKKA could be useful when working at large scale.

Scanning APIs with OAS 2.0 (Swagger):

The Open API Specification is a relative newcomer in the history of web service interface documentation. It stands apart from its predecessors by not tying itself to a specific vendor technology, and aims to embrace all forms of RESTful HTTP. Leveraging this powerful specification for automated scanning of APIs will save time by providing a straightforward mechanism to evaluate APIs without having to proxy traffic or manually build attack vectors.

Topics covered

• What is the OpenAPI Specification (Swagger)
• How Swagger/REST relates to SOAP/XML
• Tools for converting to/from swagger to 'X'.
• Scanning a simple RESTful JSON based API with Swagger
• Swaggering the SDLC.

Speaker

Scott Davis
Rapid7
Application Security Researcher
Portland, Oregon Area

Scott has been developing software professionally for over 15 years in a variety of contexts and technologies including wireless sensor networks, robotics, migration modeling & visualization, ERP, interactive projection art, product development and security services. Scott has spent as many years focusing on the security aspects of these technologies, and has leveraged this background to lead the engineering security team at Webtrends for several years. Currently, he serves as Application Security Research for Rapid7.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a 501c3 not-for-profit worldwide charitable organization focused on improving the security of application software. To sign up for future meeting notes and to discuss security topics with local gurus, sign up on the OWASP Portland mailing list: https://lists.owasp.org/mailman/listinfo/owasp-portland

Meetings are free and open to the public.

Our December meetup features a presentation by Mike Jang (Senior Staff Technical Writer at ForgeRock), as well as several very important announcements for the community. You don't want to miss this!

Here's a teaser for Mike's presentation, "Minimum Viable Documentation for RESTful APIs":

To paraphrase a James Bond movie, "Swagger is not enough..."

...You've done the work to set up OpenAPI specification REST calls for your APIs (Inaccurately known as "Swagger"). You have reference information. But you discover that few users are actually trying REST calls on your system. You're wondering: "What else do I need?"

This presentation will describe the Minimal Viable Documentation (MVD) for RESTful APIs, also known as "What do I need for my developer portal?"

Based loosely on Kristof Van Tomme's presentations on Developer Experience, Mike will describe the MVD for a developer portal, what will help your developers try out your APIs.