Jennifer Smith - The Internet of Strings: Getting Smarter about Web Integration

Jennifer Smith explores how to use generative testing and consumer-driven contracts to verify web integration and API expectations in Clojure.

We build increasingly sophisticated architectures and web applications but rely on HTTP and the humble string to hold them together. We apply widely understood data formats (XML, EDN, JSON) to our requests and responses so both sides understand structure but how does each party declare its expectations of the content of the message? In this talk I explore some of the ways we can get smarter about web integration with Clojure: how we can use generative and simulation testing, consumer-driven contracts and perhaps logic programming to better reason about uncertainties, test our assumptions and localise faults in our systems. This will include an example using janus github.com/gga/janus to perform upstream and downstream contract verification. Jen Smith is a Software Developer for ThoughtWorks based in London, UK and one of the London Clojurian organisers and speakers. She originally got into software development through the coincidence of mandatory C++ classes that formed part of her Music Technology degree. Since then she has found herself working on numerous technologies, environments and languages but is happiest when that language is Clojure.