jeudi février 15, 2007

JSR 311 - Quick follow-up thoughts

- You can do RESTful applications today with Java, only APIs like Servlets or the dynamic part of the JAX-WS APIs aren't the most natural approach (of course you can also simply use the Apache HTTPClient or java.io.HttpURLConnection classes, but Java developers deserve better than that).

- The target is J2SE 5.0 or higher and Java EE 5 or higher. Maybe Java ME. And the draft/early/out-of-the-blue roadmap mentions a final release in 2008 (so not related to Java SE 7 or Java EE 6).

- The Reference Implementation source code for this JSR will be made available under the same terms as Project GlassFish (this is the Specification Leader's responsability).

- RESTafarian Jerome Louvel of Restlets fame is part of the Expert Group.

- Marc Hadley (Spec Leader and WADL creator), Henry Story, Eliotte Rusty Harold, Dave Johnson, Tim Bray and others are all picking up the news and voicing someconcerns. The Expert Group is still recruiting. Hop on guys!

How to use Tomcat Context information in GlassFish

If you're using Tomcat and you are looking into moving to GlassFish (because of Java EE 5, admin tools, Grizzly performance, etc...), you might find this question I was asked twice recently about a specific feature migration.

If you were using Tomcat's Context feature and reading the initialization parameters say from servletContext.getInitParameter(), you need to provide the same information in a slightly different format in the standard web.xml deployment descriptor.

<context-param>
   <param-name>param</param-name>
   <param-value>value</param-value>
</context-param>

Note this can also be added to $GLASSFISH_HOME/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/config/default-web.xml if you don't want to repeat this in all your web-apps. But be careful as it takes precedence over the web application web.xml.