Microsoft selects Restlet to show REST interoperability February 20, 2009
Posted by Jerome Louvel in Ecosystem, Microsoft, Noelios, REST, Restlet, Restlet General, User interface.9 comments
After a long investment in WS-*/SOAP initiatives, Microsoft has recognized the value of REST. But they didn’t adopt REST only on the surface, they have put in place a comprehensive offer and are actively working to demonstrate and facilitate the interoperability with other platforms such as Java.
Silverlight
Facing a strong competition in the Rich Internet Application area, from Google with GWT, from Adobe with Flex/AIR/Flash and more recently from Sun with JavaFX/Applets, Microsoft has finally reacted with the introduction of their Silverlight 2 technology.
Silverlight requires a browser plug-in (ActiveX available for IE, Firefox and Safari) and provides you with a subset of the .NET Framework. Microsoft supports Windows and Mac while Novell has a Linux version called Moonlight. For the user interface it relies on a declarative language called XAML, not too different from Flex MXML or JavaFX scripts.
Regarding communication, it relies on WCF and offers direct support for HTTP/REST, RSS and Atom, POX/JSON and XML/LINQ. A description of the full architecture is available here.
Now, if you follow this blog, you are probably wondering how Silverlight interoperates with Java on the server-side. Even if its support for HTTP has a few limitations (partially due to its nature of browser plugin), Silverlight allows you to communicate easily with a REST back-end.
To demonstrates this, Microsoft has leveraged our Restlet framework and illustrated this interoperability with several detailled posts in their Silverlight plus Java blog written by Stève Sfartz from Microsoft. Other examples are available on Blog in the Cloud and Cloud it up.
eclipse4SL
If you are a traditional Microsoft developer, you would naturally turn to Visual Studio to develop your Silverlight applications, but what if you are a Java developer?
Well, Microsoft has done an unusual move by supporting the development of a Silverlight IDE for Eclipse! It’s called eclipse4SL and is co-developped with Soyatec, a French software editor specialized in Eclipse products development.
REST interoperability is also covered in eclipse4SL’s user documentation, illustrated by the usage of Restlet on the server-side. See this page for Restlet guidance. This is currently based on Restlet 1.0 and a Tomcat deployment, but work is underway to upgrade to Restlet 1.1.
The eclipse4SL project has even been submitted to the Eclipse foundation. See this post from the executive director of the Eclipse foundation.
TechDays
After meeting with Stève Sfartz, who very enthusiastically introduced us to Microsoft projects for REST, cloud computing and RIA, we worked on a join presentation for the Microsoft TechDays in Paris.
The goal was to present interoperability scenarios around REST. Thierry Boileau did the presentation for Noelios Technologies. A detailled summary (in French) has been posted by Stève Sfartz on his blog.
This presentation gave us the opportunity to show case our recent support for the Shared Key HTTP authentication scheme. This protocol is similar to the one defined for Amazon S3 and allows you to access to Microsoft Azure Data Services from a Restlet Java client.
This new feature is available in recent snapshots of our future Restlet 1.2 release!
Update 1: article from BetaNews covering Eclipse4SL and mentioning Restlet
Update 2: Stève Sfartz has posted a complete article on MSDN detailling the example showcased at the TechDays (in French), including downloadable source code.
