Restlet 1.2 M1 released January 23, 2009
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet Releases.2 comments
Restlet 1.2 is on its way with a first milestone! Let’s review the main changes made since version 1.1…
Security refactoring
The refactoring of the Restlet security model has been the most requested change since the Restlet 1.0 release. Fortunately, after a long maturation period, it has finally made a huge step forward, materialized by the addition of an “org.restlet.security” package. The new design is the synthesis of many contributions and discussions from the community.
Therefore, I’d like to especially thank Bruno Harbulot, Stephan Koops, Rémi Dewitte, Raif S. Naffah, Rob Heittman, Roman Geus, Alex Horn and Rhett Sutphin for their precious help. We still have much work ahead to complete and fully implement the new design but there is now a good foundation for feed-back and contributions.
Packages restructuring
In order to simplify even more the learning and deployment of Restlet applications, the Restlet API and its implementation (ie. the Restlet Engine) have been merged into a single module (ie. JAR, bundle). All engine classes were moved to “org.restlet.engine“.
In addition, all extensions are now located under a “org.restlet.ext” root package. This means that all extensions previously under “com.noelios.restlet.ext” have been moved. Be careful as this will break existing applications relying on those packages. However, as all the classes are still present, the migration should be straightforward, especially if you use the auto-import feature of your IDE.
Note that the core Restlet API has not significantly changed itself, only a few extensions are affected and a couple of classes not typically used by Restlet application developers such as:
- org.restlet.util.Engine moved to org.restlet.engine.Engine
- org.restlet.util.Helper moved to org.restlet.engine.Helper
- org.restlet.util.ByteUtils moved to org.restlet.engine.io.ByteUtils
- org.restlet.util.DateUtils moved to org.restlet.engine.util.DateUtils
Note also, that there were two Spring extensions in Restlet 1.1. Now they are merged under the “org.restlet.ext.spring” extension, led by Rhett Sutphin.
Connector enhancements
Thanks to a contribution of Kevin Conaway, the internal HTTP client now supports the HTTPS protocol as well, with parameters to configure SSL.
In addition, a Lucene extension has been created to host the Solr client connector contributed by Rémi Dewitte who will lead this extension. There is also a TikaRepresentation available to leverage Lucene Tika subproject when extracting metadata from representations.
Semantic Web initial support
As announced last August when we presented the Restlet 1.2 roadmap, we want to make Restlet a great framework to build applications for the Semantic Web. The relationship between REST and RDF is perfect and builds around the concept of resources and their representations (REST) and the expression of meaningful links between those resources (RDF).
We have written a detailed specification and gathered feed-back from the community and especially Henry Story, an expert in this area.
In Restlet 1.2 M1, we have added Literal, Link, LinkReference, LinkSet and RdfRepresentation classes. That makes it easy to build a RDF graph, like you would use a DOM API to build and XML document. We now have to develop the serialization and deserialization logic during the next milestone for formats like RDF/XML and RDF/n3.
Direct contributors
- Ben Johnson
- Charles Gay
- Cliff Binstock
- Cliff Binstock
- Daniel Woo
- Eirik Bjorsnos
- Frank Hellwig
- John D. Mitchell
- Jonas Maturana Larsen
- Kevin Conaway
- Nicolas Rinaudo
- Remi Dewitte
- Rob Heittman
Thanks for all others who helped us supporting the community in the discussion list!
Additonal resources
Changes log:
http://www.restlet.org/documentation/1.2/changes
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.2/restlet-1.2m1.zip
http://www.restlet.org/downloads/1.2/restlet-1.2m1.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 (access reserved to subscribers)
Mule ESB integrates Restlet 1.1 January 16, 2009
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Restlet, Restlet General.2 comments
Last year, MuleSource released RESTpack, an extension for their leading open source Mule ESB product. This pack has just been updated and now includes support for the latest Restlet 1.1 version.
The Restlet transport provides a deep integration, both on the server and the client side, between Restlet and Mule ESB. For more information, you can read the dedicated documentation page.
We had the opportunity to talk with Dan Diephouse, the software architect and REST expert who is leading this effort.
We asked him what are the benefits that Mule RESTpack and Restlet transport bring to existing Restlet users and, more generally, how do ESB and REST fit together conceptually?
The big benefit is that you can start to build integration applications that not only utilize RESTful HTTP services, but JMS, email, BPM, etc. In addition to just hosting Restlet services in a container like fashion, you can do things like:
- Route messages to different services and transports (e.g. using URI templates to route to different JMS queues)
- Kick of other process flows when an HTTP Response is sent
- Utilize all the built in capabilities for transformations, routing, and message filtering that Mule has to offer.
If you are looking for an ESB solution with strong REST support, this is a great opportunity to leverage two mature open source technologies. We already had a report of a successful usage of Restlet with Mule ESB in a large project in France!
