Of course there will always be a place for a little more talking and I’ll be doing some of this myself as part of the CES panel Privacy & Security in the Cloud. This discussion will take place on Monday Jan 7, 11am-12pm, in LVCC, North Hall N259. The panel is chaired by my good friend Jeremy Geelan, founder of Cloud Computing Expo, who honed his considerable moderation skills at the BBC.

I’m planning on exploring the intersection between the cloud and our increasingly ubiquitous consumer devices. We will highlight the opportunities created by this technological convergence but we will also consider the implications this has for our personal privacy. I hope you can join us.

Tomorrow (that’s Friday November 9) at 10:30am, I’ll be discussing the challenges of mobile app UX at QCon in San Francisco. In a presentation called “HTML5 Cross-Platform Mobile Apps Integrating APIs”, I’ll be outlining significant challenges around API-driven mobile apps, as well as mistakes developers commonly make, and suggesting best practices for addressing them.

I hope you can make, if you’re at the show. Also, be sure to visit Layer 7 at booth #11.

For the Layer 7 perspective on these service technology trends, come see our presentations throughout the week. On Monday, I’ll be speaking about how traditional SOA technologies such as the enterprise service bus (ESB) need to adapt to an evolving IT landscape. On Tuesday, our CTO Scott Morrison will be giving a closing keynote about “The New Governance”.  Wednesday brings an API Management Workshop at the Canadian High Commission, hosted by Layer 7 along with our customer MoneySupermarket.com and analyst firm RedMonk.

Layer 7 is a Founding Partner at the Symposium and we’re excited to welcome a who’s who of analysts, vendors and enterprises to join in the conversation. These illustrious attendees have helped to define the industry and revolutionize enterprise IT – and I’m looking forward to insightful speakers and great networking opportunities. For a more intimate conversation, stop by our booth (#110) to see a demo or discuss your SOA, cloud, API or mobile use cases.

London has shown an incredible amount of enthusiasm for sporting events this summer, from the Olympics and Paralympics to the Tour de France, which was won by a Brit for the first time in its history. Let’s keep that excitement going – see you at the Symposium!

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!

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.

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.

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.

However, these technologies are only half the story. The other half is the API that provides a method of interaction with the server. To provide a rich, functional interface, this API must be user-friendly for people and machines. It should be easy to develop against, with or without extensive documentation. And it should be able to represent both the current application state and the operations available to the client. These API design principles were discussed by Layer 7’s Principal API Architect, Mike Amundsen, in his fascinating talk on Wednesday.

QCon was yet another in a long line of analyst, enterprise and developer conferences to draw the same conclusions about the future of enterprise IT. It’s time to look at software development in a new way – and Layer 7 is helping enterprises get on board with these new technologies. Our recently-announced SecureSpan Mobile Access Gateway provides the middleware necessary to adapt internal information assets into secure, optimized APIs consumable by mobile devices for enterprise mobile enablement or BYOD.

If you’re attending this year’s London event, come by Layer 7′s booth to learn about our new mobile offerings or enjoy the company of the Queen herself during a special hospitality event, where we’ll be celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. Also, if you get the opportunity, don’t miss the chance to hear Rhys Jones from Royal Bank of Scotland (a Layer 7 customer) talking about his organization’s journey to the cloud.

My role at Layer 7 is to help business leaders, developers and architects design, develop and deploy world-class APIs – ones that work today and will continue to provide value well into the future. While there’s a good bit of material on the strategic importance, drawing power and business opportunities of APIs, I think more information is needed on how to design and implement APIs that will stand the test of time. And that’s what my QCon talk will be about.

The Web was conceived as a “living” system that could easily accommodate new hardware, software and information. The Web’s incredible growth over the last 20 years proves a complex system like the World Wide Web can actually work in this way but it’s rare that an organization’s developer team is able to successfully design and implement an API strategy that exhibits these same characteristics. Too often, API implementations fail to account for the continued evolution and growth of an organization.

But this level of flexibility and reliability is entirely possible, using technologies and methods we already have today. The key to creating a powerful API, it turns out, is in the design of the messages sent back and forth between parties. Reliable and evolvable API design is based not on function calls and shared objects but on hypermedia-style messages.

Two years ago, I started work on a project to analyze and identify important hypermedia factors used on the Web. This work led to a formal definition of “Hypermedia Types” and the creation of a set of H-Factors that can be used in the design process for creating new, powerful APIs that have the flexibility, usability and longevity of HTML pages themselves. In 2011, my book Building Hypermedia APIs with Node & HTML5 was published and – in less than a year – the methodologies and techniques outlined in that book have begun to appear in API designs by Nokia Research, CloudApp, RStatus and others.

My talk will cover not only the basics of Hypermedia APIs but also some of the successes and challenges these (and other) companies encountered in moving from fixed RPC-style application interfaces rooted in local network application models to more powerful and extensible hypermedia-style interfaces that take advantage of the unique aspects of distributed networks and cloud computing.

For those looking not just at the immediate benefits but also the long-term value of a powerful API strategy, QCon is an excellent conference. There are dozens of great talks on all aspects of software development and I’m honored to be participating in this year’s event. I hope you’ll join me there and that you’ll stop by Layer 7′s booth to say “hello”.