Version 0.9.4 of RESTx – the fastest way to create RESTful web services – has just been released. The main features introduced by this version are the ability to write components in server-side JavaScript, the addition of a JavaScript client library and much improved handling of content types for input and output. You can download it now.
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Ever now and then you find a new piece of software or feature, which ends up changing the way you work, saving you time and just overall making things easier for you and your organization. We think that the RESTx project with its new 0.9.2 release gains such a feature. We call it “specialized components”. What is that, why is it useful and how will it make things easier for you? In a moment I will use an example for illustration, but let me first provide a little background on RESTx. If you are already familiar with RESTx, you can skip over the next chapter.
RESTx: A quick introduction
RESTx – we believe – is the fastest way to create RESTful web services. RESTx is a fully RESTful, small, stand-alone server. A RESTx server houses components – code that implements some functionality for data access, integration or processing, written in either Java or Python. (more…)
Today we are happy to announce the release of version 0.9.2 of RESTx – the fastest and simplest way to create RESTful web services.
Besides the usual, numerous small improvements and fixes there are also a number of exciting major new features and capabilities:
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We have put up a screencast that shows you how to get started with RESTx, our platform for the rapid, easy creation of RESTful web services.
RESTx allows developers to contribute data access, integration and processing components in Java or Python, using a very simple API. Then, with nothing more than a browser and a simple HTML form, users provide parameters for those components, which the RESTx server uses to create new RESTful web services, resulting in easy to use, safe URIs that give users access to the data they need. For example, a developer may contribute a component for access to the API of a legacy application, but the users now provide different sets of query parameters, resulting in resources such as ‘customer list’, ‘order queue’, etc. (more…)
Our RESTx project – a platform for the rapid and easy creation of RESTful web services and resources – is largely written in Python. Python is a dynamic, duck-typed programming language, which puts very little obstacles between your idea and working code.
At least that’s the feeling I had when I started to work with Python several years ago: Never before was I able to be so productive, so quickly with so few lines of code. I was hooked. No wonder some people describe it as ‘executable pseudo code’: Just write down what you want and for the most part, it will actually work.
Now there’s a price to pay for this increased developer productivity, where the interpreter somehow figures out at run time what it is that you actually want to do and how to let your code deal with all sorts of different types: Python is interpreted, it’s dynamic and this means that for the most part it’s slower than compiled languages.
In this article here, I will talk about an interesting optimization technique for Python, which will come as a surprise to many Python developers.
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Most people who ever worked in real-world data integration projects agree that at some point custom code becomes necessary. Pre-fabricated connectors, filter and pipeline logic can only go so far. And to top it off, using those pre-fabricated integration logic components often becomes cumbersome for anything but the most trivial data integration and processing tasks.
With RESTx – a platform for the rapid creation of RESTful web services – we recognize that custom code will always remain part of serious data integration tasks. As developers, we already know about a concise, standardized and very well defined way to express what we want: The programming languages we use every day! Why should we have to deal with complex, unfamiliar configuration files or UI tools that still restrict us in what we can do, if it is often so much more concise and simple to just write down in code what you want to have done?
Therefore, RESTx embraces custom code: Writing it and expressing your data integration logic with it is made as simple as possible.
Let me illustrate how straight forward it is to integrate data resources using just a few lines of clear, easy to read code.
We are happy to introduce RESTx, a new open source project from MuleSoft. We believe that RESTx is quite simply the quickest and easiest way to create RESTful resources and RESTful web services in your enterprise or in the cloud, to integrate data and to make your data ready to be integrated. (more…)
In early days of my career, Sun Microsystems was the company we all looked towards. No other company innovated as much in hardware and then in software as Sun Microsystems did. In fact, Apache Tomcat started as a project at Sun. I would have guessed in the early 90s that Sun would buy Oracle – oh well, how times change.
Oracle has a daunting task ahead of integrating some amazing technologies they acquired from Sun Microsystems. Several important and critical technology pieces such as MySQL, NetBeans, and the whole Java community need careful attention. It is only natural then that some other products might not get an equal amount of TLC from Oracle executives. (more…)
It’s a very good thing that Tomcat is open source software. Because it is open, it enjoys broad stand-alone adoption, plus it has been incorporated as part of many other application server products, both commercial and open source. Why reinvent the wheel when Tomcat works great as a generic web container, and the source code is free? Many smart application server teams have chosen to embed Tomcat as their web container. They pull a copy of the Tomcat source code that they know works well, put it into their own source tree, and hook Tomcat’s Ant build system into their own, and rebuild Tomcat as part of their project. (more…)
