The RESTful API has a funny place in the software development world: it’s widely regarded as the best general-purpose pattern for building web application APIs, and yet it’s also nebulous enough of a concept to cause endless disagreements within teams over exactly how to implement one.
As is often the case, I found myself working on a personal project and had some UI elements that *really* wanted to have some life to them on the screen. I started sketching some ideas in code, and by the time I was done with it, had created a reusable framework to add fairly rich animation capabilities to programs written using the JUCE application framework, where I have been doing a lot of work these past few years.
At some custom software firms, it is their primary goal to make a sale–any sale–without concern for how the project will be accomplished. There are software salespeople who will promise the moon and stars in three months for a fixed cost of $10,000. In fairness to the developers at those firms, the salespeople do not involve them in the sales process, so they are usually the first to be surprised, long before the client is disappointed. Many software horror stories going back decades start in such ways.
For the past year or so, I’ve been working as one of a group of developers within the Protocol Working Group of the MIDI Manufacturers Association to create prototype tools and applications that implement the upcoming MIDI 2.0 specification as it’s worked its way through many drafts to the point where it’s now ready to be voted on as an official standard. Read on for details on some upcoming talks I’ll be presenting on it.