The Web 2.0 meme January 13, 2006
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet General.add a comment
If you haven’t heard about the Web 2.0 by now you must have been living in a cave for a while! It’s a very successful meme that was created for a conference. Tim O’Reilly has the detailed story in this post. My definition, beside the technological features like AJAX, RSS and REST, would be: “A new generation of Web sites leveraging the Web as their main engine”.
The Restlets were designed with REST in mind as well as the idea to solve the performance issues with Servlets (can’t leverage the NIO non-blocking mode, in-memory session limit scalability and availability). The framework is indeed an excellent fit for open services that are typical of Web 2.0 sites.
If you are still wondering how Restlets fits in the Web 2.0 picture, you can check this post from Dion Hinchcliffe. Dion maintains an active blog dedicated to the Web 2.0, from a SOA and Web services point of view.
Infoworld: REST gets Java tie-in January 11, 2006
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet General.add a comment
Paul Krill from Infoworld contacted me about the Restlet project. Following this exchange, he published an article that can be found on the TechWatch blog.
Restlet coverage by eWEEK January 10, 2006
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet General.2 comments
Darryl K. Taft, a senior editor at eWEEK, has noticed the Restlet project and wrote two articles on it. The first is a general presentation of the project and the second is a Question & Answer session:
Some new facts:
- Restlet 1.0 beta 1 is planned for the end of January
- Restlet 1.0 final is planned for Q2 2006
- I’m looking to build a community around this project, if you are interested please join via the development site
- The Restlet API will be submitted to the JCP or to the Apache Foundation if there is enough interest from the community
Discussion on Restlets at TSS January 5, 2006
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet General.add a comment
An interesting discussion is going on at The Server Side following the announcement of the Restlet project. So far the feed-back has been very positive.
Some suggestions:
- Publish the code source of http://www.restlet.org as a sample application
- Integration with Spring to export services as Restlets with a simple configuration
- Build a Restlet Pet Store and compare it with a SOAP implementation (Axis)
- Provide a Servlet HTTP connector as an alternative to standalone Restlet servers would facilitate the adoption and deployment in existing infrastructures
- Configure a Restlet server with an XMLfile
Some concerns:
- Concrete advantage of using REST vs SOAP
- Benefits over Struts
- Benefits over Ruby on Rails
- Measurable improvement over Servlets and Struts in term of scalability and performance
- Will NIO ever provide the promised benefits?
- Restlets have no session mechanisms like Servlets, is it a feature? (short answer: yes!)
- Will REST advance our productivity?
Feel free to jump in or comment via this blog. The next release is already well advanced and will include a new servlet-based HTTP connector as suggested by Michael Mayr.
Swing is alive…and doing well January 3, 2006
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Java, User interface.add a comment
Have you noticed all the recent pessimism around Java and the hype pushing concurrent platforms like Ruby on Rails? A domain which frequently receives critics is the Swing GUI framework, supposed to be old, slow and badly designed. I’ve worked with it since the beta releases and still follow its evolution closely.
The release of Tiger (Java 5.0) provided a much needed update of the look and feels, the default one and the Windows XP one ; speed was also significantly improved. Meanwhile the concurrent SWT framework was aggressively pushed via the Eclipse platform. This pressure was probably needed to provoke a strong reaction and it seems to me that Mustang (Java 6.0) will hold on its promises.
Take a look at the 160 slides long presentation by Romain Guy and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (in English except for the first two slides). It’s comprehensive and truly exciting: congratulations! Here are some interesting facts:
- The size of the JRE 1.5 is 7.1 MB and the size of the .NET Framework 2.0 is 23 MB
- Better desktop integration (icons, Windows system tray, Mac dock integration, slash screens)
- Perfect native look and feels. Also see directory.
- SwingLabs hosts several interesting projects like the standard SwingX components suite (date picker, login panel, table improvements like column selection, sorting, task panel similar to Windows explorer panels, etc.)
- Great third-party components complete the features like JFreeChart, JGraph, JGoodies. Also see directory.
That’s great to see a strong and active community around GUI frameworks in Java (see Java Desktop and Client Java) and that Swing is alive…and doing well.
