Surveying the land scape

After spending the obligatory time setting up my java project and being led off in many and varied directions chasing shiny new APIs and tools I have come REST back at Java and Maven.

There are certainly a myriad of new frameworks in the JVM, especially with the inclusion of such a diverse array of new languages like JRuby, Groovy and Scala. In the last few weeks I have kicked the tyres of most of them, and certainly the odd one a good test drive. But at this stage I have decided to stick with the old trusty Java and Maven team.

This is not say I am any worse off for the trip having seen some great ideas, new features and tricks I will surely call upon in the future, however in my case all of the building blocks I need for my RestMS server are all written in Java, and for a basic functional 1.0 will be fine bound together using Java.

The reason for sticking with Maven is just the sheer array of plugins, tools and overall power of this build tool. God knows I fight with it, dodging and weaving through it's more complex areas but at the end of the day it does a lot of shit I just cannot be bothered with, or didn't even think was possible. And all with a small tweak here and sometimes bit of head bashing. This paired with the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants, borrowing ideas from the wide array of large projects already using it makes it quite an attractive path.

In addition to development toolsets is the wide variety of open source hosting environments, with http://sourceforge.net, http://code.google.com and http://github.com to name a few. Having also given them all a try again lately I have selected github.com for my storm-cloud project. I can summarise the reason for this by saying I am amazed by how it is entirely focused on the code, how it is browsed, how it is shared. Their interface for code browsing is much more interactive than the other project sites. This paired with the ability to add a nice welcome page to your project is very cool.

So my new project site is http://github.com/wolfeidau/storm-cloud

I am currently, albeit slowly, chipping away at my todo list, adding structure, function and of course tests :)

RestMS a voyage of discovery

For quite some time I have been researching lightweight asynchronous messaging protocols for use as a signalling protocol and the transport of telemetry. Ideally I was looking for something which built upon current protocols, and established client implementations rather than re-inventing the wheel. Quite recently I chanced upon RestMS and after reading through each of the draft specifications, and going through the perl example client code that this could well be a good basis for what I was looking for.

Below are some of the reasons I was attracted to RestMS, albeit quite young at the moment.

1. It uses HTTP which is everywhere, with clients for pretty much everything.
2. It is based on the REST approach to data access and services.
3. The documentation relating to this stack clearly illustrates a lot of thought and experience has gone into these specifications.
4. Some nice high level diagrams with a good explanation of behavior, this provides a great starting point for someone building or evaluating the use of this stack.

So based on this I decided to setup a project to work on my implementation of RestMS, in my language of choice being Java. This can be found at http://code.google.com/p/storm-cloud/.

While looking into the basis for RestMS I have read a lot of resources on the web, I have pulled some of them into the following list.

• REST
• HTTP 1.1 method definitions
• HTTP 1.1 status code definitions
• Building Web Services the REST Way
• How to Create a REST Protocol