Over the weekend of September 13-15, a small band of Web architects and developers will – for the third year in a row – descend upon the town of Greenville, SC. They’ll be getting together to catch up on the events of the past year, share stories about recent projects and contemplate the future of Web and mobile applications.

This may sound like a typical tech conference but REST Fest is hardly that. Taking its cue from OpenSpaces and similar events, REST Fest is organized by attendees, for attendees. For example, one of the days is devoted to everyone hacking on the same general topic. Another is dedicated to short workshops, all presented by selected registrants.

Similarly, all the general session talks are delivered by the attendees themselves. That’s because one of the “rules” of REST Fest is “everyone talks and everyone listens”. When you sign up to join REST Fest, you are expected to deliver at least a five-minute lightning talk – and there are no exceptions!

Notable presenters will include keynote speaker Stu Charlton (former CTO of Elastra), Matt Bishop (Senior Product Architect at Elastic Path), Pat Cappelaere (currently working on NASA’s SensorWeb project), Leonard Richardson (co-author of O’Reilly’s RESTful Web Services), Sam Ramji (Head of Strategy at Apigee) and yours truly.

I feel privileged to be co-chair of REST Fest and I’m pleased to note that Layer 7 is the event’s Head Sponsor this year. Hope to see you there!

VMworld 2012 kicks off at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week. At the event, VMware will be making some exciting announcements around the delivery and management of public and private clouds using automation technologies.

Rapid deployment and onboarding has always been a key requirement for Layer 7 solutions, which is what initiated our strong partnership with VMware years ago. These announcements will showcase the next step in that evolution.

Layer 7 will be presenting at the VMworld Solutions Exchange and we’d love for you to stop by to talk about how we take advantage of the latest VMware technology. Come discuss your use case and find out how we can:

• Protect and manage vCloud APIs
• Securely expose APIs from a vCloud-based solution
• Govern infrastructures based on the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT)
• Orchestrate APIs for value-added interfaces
• Dynamically provision vApps from policy based on SLAs
• Enforce access control and threat protection across hybrid cloud environments

We’ll also be giving demonstrations of our VMware Ready certified products, including the SecureSpan Mobile Access Gateway and Layer 7 API Portal. In case you can’t catch us on the west coast, we’ll also be at the VMware Forum in Toronto on September 20.

As a San Diego resident, I always love it when friends or relatives come for a visit because it gives me an opportunity to show off the great attractions that America’s Finest City has to offer. From the beaches to the parks to the World Famous San Diego Zoo, there is a multitude of great sights to see.

Next week, IT professionals and enterprise decision makers will descend on San Diego for the Gartner Catalyst Conference. While I hope they have the opportunity to see something of the city, there will be plenty of sights at the Manchester Grand Hyatt from Monday to Wednesday. Discussion topics will include building out a mobile strategy, creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure and making use of “big data”. And Layer 7 will be there in force.

Stop by our booth (#K24), have a drink with us at the reception or visit our zoo-themed hospitality suite in the Oxford room, on Wednesday night. You’ll be able to see our SecureSpan Mobile Access Gateway and the latest version of our API Portal in action, including fun demos of functionality for OAuth and streaming Web protocols.

To hear about a real-world application of our technology, come listen to Thomas Nienhaus of Lilly present on the topic of “Secure Data Access Through a Mobility Gateway” (at 4pm on Tuesday). You could also schedule some time with one of our experts, who will review your technology needs, match them with a Layer 7 solution and provide a live look at our products. We can even give you some hot tips on where to find the best fish tacos in town.

Steve and I had another great Tech Talk in Vancouver this week, discussing the recent controversy around OAuth 2.0 and the state of the standard in general. A couple of questions that came up (thank you Michael and David, among others) were around the availability of libraries for iOS and Android platforms.

Although I’m not as familiar with Android, there definitely seems to be a lack of tooling for enabling OAuth 2.0 on iOS today. The lack of client-side libraries for standards-based access control on mobile devices generally could be problematic for API adoption in the enterprise, as mobile applications represent one of the main targets for enterprise APIs.

Facilitating OAuth on mobile applications is going to be central to my presentation at next week’s Chicago Mobile Meetup where I’ve been invited to speak. At the meetup, we’ll be describing client-side OAuth tooling patterns, exchanging our ideas about different approaches and discussing some code samples.

From there, I will be making my way to Australia for an API Management Breakfast Seminar in Melbourne, where I’ll be talking about API Management in general but also covering the latest in OAuth 2.0 solutions. Finally, I’ll be moving on to the Gartner AADI Summit in Sydney, where Layer 7 will be at booth S6.

Quite a bit has been written about how the Cloud is altering the landscape for platform, software and infrastructure providers but not as much has been said about what all this means for developers. I recently decided to find out for myself by going on an “all-cloud diet”. In practical terms, this meant I used a sealed netbook or smartphone to do all my work.

Therefore, I had to do all the things an active developer regularly has to do (coding, debugging, testing etc.) from a device that has no appreciable hard-drive space and does not allow the installation of any customer software. In essence, I was on a strict diet of browser-based and plug-in based tools and services reachable via an Internet connection.

In relatively short order I was able to find browser-based editors (even ones that support line-by-line server-side debugging!), tools for managing data stores and code repositories. Furthermore, I was able to post test scripts for execution/review and even deploy my projects to a wide range of server providers – all from my browser.

Along the way, I discovered that I had an easier time collaborating online with colleagues in other locations and was better able to take advantage of the most recent releases of new services and tools (since there was no “install” or “update” I had to manage). And – of course – I was more mobile in the process.

Not all programming languages, runtime environments and server profiles are represented in the cloud. And there are still many details to work out in order to make assembling a full-featured “cloud tool chain” easy, reliable and cost effective. Nevertheless, I can see that it is a possibility and I have met people who are working to make that possibility a reality.

My advice to developers would be: Conduct your own experiments; try out your own “cloud-only diet” and see what you learn. Even if you decide that not all the pieces you need are available, you may still discover there are ways to leverage cloud-based tooling to reduce barriers, add flexibility and increase productivity in various aspects of your development efforts.

I’ll be exploring these issues in greater depth when I present a talk titled Programming with the OSS “Cloud Stack” at the CloudDevelop show in Columbus, OH on August 3.