REST WADL - tools and information

I'm interested to use REST or REST-like web services within a traditional thick client (as well as AJAX web apps) - using WADL to describe them (from existing services) and tools to automatically generate client API code (in a variety of languages).

Standards:

• JAX-RS (JSR 311)

Digging around, I come across some interesting articles and blogs, including:

REST Describe and REST Compile:

Thomas Steiner's blog http://blog.tomayac.de/index.php?date=2007-03-12&time=17:11:27&perma=Automatic+Multi+Lang.html describing two tools to be developed.

• The REST describe and REST compile project report http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgdcn6h3_38fz2vn5
• A working on-line example of REST describe http://tomayac.de/rest-describe/latest/RestDescribe.html
• REST compile/describe screen cast http://youtube.com/user/tomayac
• Tech talk video on the tools http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2EtAEBpq0

Java.Net resources:

• Glassfish - Jersey - Java.Net WADL project https://jersey.dev.java.net/what-is-jersey.html
• The wadl2java tool https://wadl.dev.java.net/

Other resources and blogs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnetinterop/archive/2008/02/06/wadl-and-wsdl-and-rest-oh-my.aspx

An article on REST WADL http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1265367,00.html

Blog by William Martinez Pomares with interesting follow up discussion http://acoscomp.com/wblog//index.php/a/2007/06/10/wadl_rest_and_wsdl


REST Describe and REST Compile tools:

Trying the on-line REST Describe on an existing web service I'd published previously showed promising results.

The current status of REST Compile is that is supports:

• Java
• PHP5
• Ruby
• Python

but .Net is not provided as yet.

DNS troubles on Solaris

After having a little DNS trouble on Solaris, here are some useful links for future reference:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.jsp

http://www.learning-solaris.com/index.php/configuring-a-dns-server/

http://www.softpanorama.org/DNS/dns_clients.shtml

Solaris 10, X fails to start after installing VMWare tools

Note to self - if this happens restore the pre-installation vmware_drv.so as per this link:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/93366

and this one too http://knowledgefrontier.blogspot.com/2008/04/opensolaris-snv86-on-vmware-with.html

which is essentially to do this:

mv /usr/X11/lib/modules/drivers/vmware_drv.so.BeforeVMwareToolsInstall /usr/X11/lib/modules/drivers/vmware_drv.so

luckily vmware keeps the old copy, which is handy....

this is dead easy when you know it. When it only shows up as a problem after a reboot, and the time between installing the tools and rebooting is days or weeks with many other changes in-between - working out the cause and effect relationship is not always so obvious :)

Blastwave for easy Apache http 2.2 and mod_jk, on Solaris SXDE 10

Goal: Install mod_jk for Apache http 2.2.x with minimal effort!

Such that Apache http can be tested as a front for Glassfish 2ur2 (rather than the usual Tomcat) using the same mod_jk connector...

A handy binary of mod_jk for Solaris and the right version of Apache http didn't seem readily available.

Here are some quick notes on Solaris, Blastwave, Apache httpd and mod_jk

Decided to try out the Blastwave software repository for CSW, site is here http://www.blastwave.org/

Rough steps as follows:

Follow http://www.blastwave.org/howto.html

which is essentially:

pkgadd -d http://www.blastwave.org/pkg_get.pkg
/opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i wget

/opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i apache2
/opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i ap2_mod_jk

and optionally:

cp -p /var/pkg-get/admin-fullauto /var/pkg-get/admin

check the exact version installed:

/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/httpd -v

stop existing service installed as part of SXDE:

svcadm disable apache22
svcs apache22

check lib dsos:

/opt/csw/apache2/libexec

start the server manually:

/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apachectl start
/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apachectl stop


Todo:

Configure Apache http and mod_jk
Configure Glassfish with libs etc
Test web applications including failure conditions
Set Blastwave installed version as a service