GOOP Digital WordPress web developer Harley Oliver reports from the A Day of REST conference in Boston, USA, where he is learning about the new WordPress REST API.
The Day of Rest conference here in Boston kicked off this morning with a great opening keynote by Tom Wilmot, explaining how the REST API came about and how it will completely change the way we use the WordPress platform in the future.
Joe Hoyle ran over a small part of authentication with the REST API again in the succeeding talk, also getting into the more complex ways about ingesting and posing content to and from the API with either simple HTTP requests or client libraries dependant on the project’s needs.
Phil Sturgeon then gave a talk on when things can go a bit wrong when using APIs within a project or even the caveats of working on your own API. Use cases with HTTP errors upon API requests were a big staple of his talk, highlighting the need to always code with the worst case scenario in mind, and never trusting things to work as intended when you’re dealing with third party interfaces.
The two talks after lunch from Adam Silverstein and Kelly Dwan gave their opinions and experience on using the WordPress API with two different Javascript frameworks. These were both really interesting to hear as both frameworks that were covered have very different use cases, technological pros and cons and ease of use. Both highlighted the fact that using data out of the WordPress API has a lot of new and exciting implementations, not only one the front-end but as well as extending the admin interface within the WordPress dashboard.
Lunch was served with a huge spread and there I got the chance to chat with some other attendees and see how they all used WordPress. Having learnt that not everyone was directly using WordPress just highlighted the fact that the REST API is gaining interest from all sorts of developers that can now leverage the ease of content creation within WordPress itself to be used anywhere and everywhere that data is needed to be displayed.
Lightning talks followed lunch with three 10-minute talks covering the WordPress REST API and non-developers. John Eckman covered the new terms and slang that come with learning all the ins and outs of using an API to build projects, Mel Choyce covered how designers are going to be able to learn new methodologies within interaction design due to using Javascript instead of PHP.
Petya Raykovksa made the interesting point of what using the API within a project will do to users that expect core things out of WordPress, things like making and maintaining menus within the dashboard go out the window with this kind of project and it was interesting to hear how that will affect usability for non-developers going forward.
Rachel Baker, co-lead on the REST API itself explained how there are still limitations on how the API notifies a change in data, and how a small internal API can be created within WordPress that can be used to reflect changes that happen within WordPress posts as they’re being displayed in real time.
A short break then went into two vastly different but every insightful and entertaining presentations. K. Adam White, lead designer on the API covered his client library that he had created for node.js and now browser implementations of the WordPress REST API. He ran over the choices that were made to keep the library as simple and easy to use, not only for himself going back on it, but future developers stepping into using the API for the first time.
Ben Foxall then gave probably the most far-removed-from-WordPress talk of the day, but definitely the most entertaining. Using a protocol called MQTT, he live programmed a button to contact a server he had set up in London, then relayed the button press to a string of fairly lights with the ability to change the colour of any of the lights programmatically. To tie this into WordPress, he then live demonstrated making the button post to WordPress and having WordPress notify the fairly lights and change them upon different events within the admin dashboard.
All in all it was an absolutely massive day with some of the biggest contributors to the API itself and people using the API for clients holding talks and sharing their knowledge with the community.