Noelios Consulting

Since 2004, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has become a forefront user of Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). As explained by Jeff Norris in the foreword of the “Eclipse RCP” book, this choice was driven by the UI-level features as well as the modularity offered by Eclipse’s plug-in architecture : Equinox.

The usage of Eclipse RCP started within the JET’s Maestro team and is now shared with other teams at NASA via a framework named ‘Ensemble’. You can read the whole story in this case study.

As Equinox is in fact a full OSGi run-time, it is possible to use it for server-side applications as well. For EclipseCon 2008, Khawaja S Shams and Jeff Norris have given a great presentation on the integration between Equinox and REST, leveraging the Restlet API. The slides are available online.

They introduce the ‘Ensemble REST Framework’, providing a convenient definition of new Restlet Resources via Equinox extension points. This integration nicely uses Eclipse wizards to define those Equinox extension points. Just note that extension points are not yet part of the standard OSGi speciciations.

This initiative, as well as constant interest in OSGi from our users has led us to improve the support for OSGi in the upcoming Restlet 1.1 M4 release. Each JAR in the Restlet distribution is now a full OSGi bundle. An internal activator automatically registers the Noelios Restlet Engine (NRE) with the Restlet API, or the pluggable connectors with the NRE.

You can get more details about the current and planned support for OSGi in Restlet in this RFE. We are also looking forward to playing with Ensemble REST framework which will be released in open source by NASA.

Last week, we met Outerthought, the creators of Daisy CMS. We use Daisy to run our Restlet community wiki and we found it very powerful and flexible. For example, there is an integrated book publishing feature, with table of contents edition, clean PDF and HTML generation and complete user management.

Outerthought has also been a very active Restlet contributor recently and they are now working on a new Web framework called Kauri. What is new with Kauri is the desire to address the needs of all the team members involved in Web application development and provide them an integrated solution, from the front-end to the back-end. This project also has a strong focus on REST and modularity and is built on top of other open source projects including Restlet, jQuery and Spring.

We spent a great day meeting Steven Noels, Marc Portier and Bruno Dumon in their nice and modern offices located near Gent (Belgium), introducing each others, sharing our views on open source business development and discussing technical aspects related to Restlet and Kauri. Steven has written a nice blog report on this day.

It’s just over a month since 1.1 M2 and we have again made tremendous
progress towards our final release.

Main changes:

• Licensing scheme changed to CDDL 1.0 or LGPL 2.1 or LGPL 3.0
• New JAX-RS extension implementing the draft JSR-311
• New OAuth extension as a pluggable authentication scheme
• New XDB extension providing integration with Oracle embedded JVM

• SSL support much improved with access to new attributes
• XmlRepresentation refactored to support SAX and DOM sources
• Major TransformRepresentation refactoring (config, reuse, SAX)
• Reference class now enforces the usage of valid URI characters
• Grizzly HTTP server now support chunked encoding of responses

Updated dependencies:

• Spring to version 2.5.2
• db4o to version 7.2 (adds transparent update)
• JavaMail to version 1.4.1
• JAF to version 1.1.1

Direct contributors:

• Adam Rosien (OAuth)
• Avi Flax
• Bruno Harbulot
• Chuck Mortimore
• Dan Diephouse
• Jeroen Goubert
• Joe Nellis
• Kevin Conaway
• Marc Portier
• Marcelo Ochoa (XDB)
• Paul J. Lucas
• Peter Neubauer
• Rhett Sutphin
• Rob Heittman
• Stephan Koops (JAX-RS)
• Steve Loughran
• Yuri de Wit

Changes log:
http://www.restlet.org/documentation/1.1/changes

Download links:
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.1/restlet-1.1m3.zip
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.1/restlet-1.1m3.exe

Maven repositories:
http://maven.restlet.org is updated on the 1st and 15th of each month
http://maven.noelios.com is updated daily with new artifacts

An innovating start-up called RunMyProcess is proposing a SaaS (Software as a Service) product that can:

• model your business processes using an intuitive and graphical tool
• host and execute your business processes
• manage them and generate reports
• connect to various on-line applications such as Google Apps, Zoho, FreshBooks, BaseCamp or SalesForce

A RESTful platform has been developed from scratch using a MySQL database and the Restlet project, hosted in a JBoss engine. For the front-end leverages the Adobe’s Flex RIA technology.

Completed with an advanced on-line form product such as frevvo which we presented before, it provides a very attractive SaaS integration solution.

After two months of intense work we are finally releasing our next milestone. In addition to the numerous bug fixes and API enhancements, we would like to underline the following features:

• Addition of a HTTP server based on the Grizzly NIO framework. This connector is the first to provide end-to-end NIO support, for example with direct transfer from file to socket for static files.
• Support for HTTP DIGEST authentication (client and server side) and refactoring of engine to support pluggable authentication.
• Addition of new Spring NRE extension providing even more integration possibilities with the Servlets and Restlets at the same time. The existing Spring API extension has also been extended and improved based on users feed-back and contributions.
• Addition of JiBX extension, providing an efficient and flexible alternative to JAXB for XML to Object serialization.
• Configuration of a Component based on a XML document is now directly supported.
• Update of the Atom extension to conform to the latest APP specifications. The extension currently allows to retrieve an APP Service Document and Atom Feeds.
• Sorting of directory indexes is now based on the Alpha-numerical algorithm based on David Koelle’s original idea.
• Refactoring and enhancement of the WADL extension to support more use cases and nested resources are now supported.

We have also updated several dependencies:

• Spring to version 2.5
• db4o to version 7.0
• FreeMarker to version 2.3.12
• Grizzly to version 1.7.2

Thanks also to the direct contributors:

• Alex Milowski
• Avi Flax
• Davide Angelocola
• Derek Chiles
• Evgeny K. Shepelyuk
• Florian Schwarz
• Garriot Zhang
• Iestyn Evans
• Jason Terhune
• Kevin Conaway
• Marc Portier
• Michael Makunas
• Paul J. Lucas
• Ray Waldin
• Rhett Sutphin
• Rob Heittman
• Sean Landis
• Simon Olofsson
• Stephan Koops
• Tim Peierls
• Todd Nguyen
• William Pietri

Changes log:
http://www.restlet.org/documentation/1.1/changes

Download links:
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.1/restlet-1.1m2.zip
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.1/restlet-1.1m2.exe

Maven repositories:
http://maven.restlet.org (open) will be updated on 02/01
http://maven.noelios.com (restricted) has the new artifacts

Last year, I saw a presentation from Guillaume Laforge (Groovy’s project manager) on Domain Specific Languages (DSL). I was intrigued by the idea of DSL and eager to understand how easily the Groovy scripting language could support their development.

The demonstration was quite convincing and clearly showed the potential of Groovy, as a dynamic language, compared to a classic Java approach. If you are interested in learning more about DSL and Groovy, I recommend several links, the first is the Groovy documentation on DSL, a recent InfoQ post on Groovy DSL and an interview of Guillaume.

One of the ideas I had in mind was the creation of a Restlet DSL that would facilitate the configuration of Restlet components and applications. Fortunately, Keke Qi just contributed this feature which is now available as a Groovy module: see the GroovyRestlet home page. You can find examples like the Restlet tutorial reimplemented or an integration with Spring.

If you haven’t done so already, this is a great opportunity to give Groovy a chance!  They recently released their version 1.5.2. Guillaume also recently founded G2One, a consultancy shop specialized on Groovy & Grails that could support your projects.

With the recent release of the Oracle 11g, Oracle has added support for Java 5 to OracleJVM. This lets database developers write Java Stored Procedures and execute their Java code right inside the database. This embedded JVM also supports their XML DB feature which provides the storage and manipulation of XML right inside Oracle databases. Interestingly, XML DB also supports the native execution of Servlet 2.2 (with some restrictions).

Marcelo Ochoa, who is a consultant on Oracle/J2EE technologies and has worked for Oracle on several projects, has developed a version of the Restlet adapter for Servlet containers based on Oracle XDB. This effectively brings REST support to Oracle 11g!

We are now in the process of integrating Marcelo’s work as a new extension to the Restlet project. For now, you can get the adapter and the usage documentation on this blog post.

We have been very busy over the past 8 months with consulting work, supporting our users and the preparing the next Restlet version. Fortunately, the Restlet community has kept growing, some users becoming technical leads of new extensions :

• Stephan Koops is actively implementing the JAX-RS API (specified by the JSR-311 experts group) on top of the Restlet API
• Rob Heittman is leading a new GWT extension, courageously exploring the evolution of the Restlet API into a fully asynchronous API
• Davide Angelocola is contributing a command-line Shell extension allowing to test your Web applications easily

Other users have been sharing their experience in the blogosphere or in the real world, doing presentations on Restlet, in their local Java User Groups or at larger events.

Here we would like to promote upcoming public presentations that will cover the Restlet framework:

• Brian Sletten, a Partner at Zepheira, is part of the 2008 NFJS Symposium Tour (No Fluff Just Stuff) and will have two presentations covering Restlet:
  • Give it a REST
  • Restlet for the Weary
• John Mitchell, Chief Architect at Krugle, will be presenting a session at the SD West conference on March 5:
  • Give IT a REST: Implementing RESTful Services in Java
• Khawaja S Shams and Jeff Norris of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be presenting an exciting session on the integration between Equinox and Restlet at the EclipseCon 2008:
  • RESTful OSGI Web Applications Tutorial
• Sean Landis and Ian Robertson, respectively Director of Software Development and Lead Architect at Overstock.com, will be presenting at JavaOne 2008 (May 6-9), sharing their experience with REST applied to SOA. Overstock.com, who has been a major early adopter, will also discuss about their Restlet usage in this session:
  • Its All About the SOA: RESTful Service-Oriented Architecture at Overstock.com

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Nuxeo is the company behind one of the most complete open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. It has roots in the Zope project but made a complete switch to the Java platform last year with their 5.0 release.

Last week, they released their 5.1 version, adding a REST API based on the Restlet project. You can read details about this integration in their reference manual.

There also seems to be a good competition between Nuxeo and Alfresco, another popular Java-based open source ECM solution. One area of comparison is on the depth of the open source commitment as highlighted in this very interesting article from CMS Wire.

Another area of debate is on their support of Web Services APIs and more specifically REST APIs. James McGovern has a good post that summarizes the situation.

I have just published a blog post on Roy’s recent public interventions about REST.

For general REST subjects, I will now be posting at the dedicated News on REST blog.