One might think that the title of this blogpost is due to the fact that this summer I will be turning 30.
However it is actually a task I have been looking into, that could also be phrased as: I wish to build a REST based service, what are my options? With REST gaining in popularity I think this a question that a number of developers are asking themselves these days.

First of all what is REST? REST is about staying true to the HTTP protocol, and using it to communicate between a client and a server - as opposed to SOAP. To parafrase from Wikipedia being RESTful is about using URIs, HTTP verbs and mediatypes as the means to communicate using a traditional request/response model.

For some time I have heard good things about git and mercurial, but just never got around to really looking at it. So when I had last week off I finally got around to doing more than just cloning a repository from github or bitbucket. Basically what I needed was some easy way of doing source control for my pet projects, so either would no doubt get the job done.

My focus ended up being mostly on git simply simply because I often run into github when I read about open source projects that I find interesting. Another thing I had in the back of my head was that I could take a look at appharbor - which I hear about a lot on twitter. That being said I did read the Hg Init tutorial, just to get a feel of the differences between the two. As it turnes out they are very similar, so it will probably be the integration with github, bitbucket, heroku and so on that will decide for me in each case.