It started as a proof of concept prototype in the fall of 2010. The idea came from a meeting where we were discussing the porting of our storefront codebase from classic ASP to PHP. One of the discussion points was how to avoid simply porting the same logic from one scripting language to another, but rather finding ways to move some of that logic to other more suitable platforms, including service oriented solutions. The little program was written as a self-hosted WCF service written in VB.NET running on my Windows XP box as a console application. It implemented a RESTful API service that returned the number of products in a customer’s shopping cart. Really simple and modest in scope, the thing worked like a charm. I made a presentation about it during one of our Wayfair Engineering Lunch and Learn sessions about a week later. So far, so good. Continue reading →