jeudi septembre 17, 2009

Thoughts on REST-*

OK, I really need more than 140 characters for this one (plus it's been a while since I blogged opinions).
Of course, this is personal opinion, not my company's.

Many people have reacted to JBoss' solo launch of REST-*. What I'm concerned about is the approach, not the technology and specifications (I'm probably not the best person to comment on that part).

For one, having rest-star.org redirect to a jboss.org web site is a "bad thing" (tm). JBoss being the only participant is also not giving the underlying technical effort a lot of chance to become a commonly accepted standard, and that's a pity.

Over on twitter, my colleague Jason sent me this sensible analysis which also questions the approach taken while finding some merits to the technical parts.

Mighty Roy is simply bashing and swinging at the proposal calling for . But then not many people get his blessing from day one.

Rickard Oberg is pointing out that JBoss has a interesting track record in terms driving the project (too bad the last paragraph on his affiliation to JBoss is actually taking some credit off of that assertion).

Contrary to what Haikal says, JBoss is not late to REST with their very decent JAX-RS implementation and their participation in the standardization effort. In fact, I'm not convinced by the SpringSource excuse (SpringMVC legacy) for not implementing this API.

Getting beyond all this criticism, it's rare enough to have people offer to do actual work to demolish it like Anne Thomas is doing. I've been with Sun for too long to throw away the baby with the bath water..

If someone wants to contribute standards, OASIS, W3C, or IETF is where it should happen. Granted you'll be better off starting from some specification or even better yet from a successful implementation (and you may end up not being able to call it REST-anything), but declaring REST-* to the world and making it a one company thing sounds like a marketing mistake to me.

Nice fait sa Java sur le serveur ce vendredi 2 octobre

Le RivieraJUG, Polytech'Nice et Telecom Valley organisent une journée autour de Java EE. Il y aura deux intervenants de JBoss/RedHat : Peter Muir pour parler de Seam et JCDI (ex-WebBeans) et Tom Baeyens pour parler de jBPM. Notre Antonio Goncalves national clôturera la journée par une session sur Java EE 6. Quant à moi ce sera une présentation sur l'état d'avancement de GlassFish v3, en route pour Java EE 6. Je pense reprendre certaines démonstrations faites lors de la conférence JavaZone autour d'OSGi et du système de packaging. Des retours d'expérience et des pauses pour faire de networking sont également prévus.

L'événement est gratuit et se déroule à Sophia Antipolis sur le site de Polytech. L'agenda quasi-final (de 13:30 à 21:15!) et tous les autres détails se trouvent ici sur le site du RivieraJUG (accès direct à l'inscription).