My name is Adam Hawkins. I'm a rubyist, rails guy, and general open source nerd. I love to contribute to open source projects I use as well as write my own. I scratch my own itches through my open source work. When I'm not coding I travel and enjoy trance in very heavy doses.
This talk covers the basics in creating a reusable sync service that connects an application to various external systems (Google, MS Exchange, others) over a standard interface. It describes the processing for making the service accessible over HTTP and bundling it inside a Rails application. The talk covers the architecture using OOP design patterns, requirements, implementations, and use cases.
This talk covers a real life use case our company faced. We had a tightly coupled exchange sync implementation. It needed to be extracted into different parts so it could easily connect to MS Exchange, Google and any other external resource we could think of. I've never seen this used before so I thought it would be an interesting topic.