I am becoming more and more addicted to chronicling the minutiae of my everyday activities. To this end, and at the behest of @rich13, I figured I’d record another of my addictions: caffeine. I decided to do this in mycrocosm (as I couldn’t get an invite to daytum) so I could look at pretty graphs and use the handy twitter posting feature.
For my job, I’m looking into social-networking related web-services, particularly RESTful ones. Naturally, this meant starting with OpenSocial’s 0.8.1 REST protocol, and reading more specification documents than I generally care to. OpenSocial neatly standardises the solution to a number of problems that I’ve been given, particularly around providing an interface for the storage and retrieval of a user’s activity on bbc.co.uk.
Even more interesting are the reference implementations for these interfaces provided by Shindig, conveniently (or not, depending upon your particular brand of fanaticism) written in the BBC’s current preferred service-layer programming language: Java. The code additionally looks pretty sensible, as laid out here, by using useful technologies like Maven and Jetty, and generally not looking like a massive pile of fail. The only constructive criticism I would bring is that the REST request handling or routing doesn’t use any of the standard frameworks, particularly Restlet.
The lovely @sicross pointed me at SocialSite, a Sun initiative that looks to extend the OpenSocial specification and Shindig code-base. This is all well explained, in 2 parts, here. The particular extensions to the REST interface, of note, are mostly around friending other people, groups and messages. SocialSite is certainly interesting, and covers areas that I’ll need to develop in the next x months. However, at first glance it doesn’t have the same maturity of code-base and documentation of Shindig (which is pretty green itself). Even the wiki is nigh-on impenetrable! Additionally it has diverged from some of Shindig’s technology choices by employing Ant and Glassfish, which seems a shame.
The main reason for my writing this post was actually the interesting discussion that the OpenSocial RESTful protocol, and SocialSite’s extension specification, has generated. Representational State Transfer was, as everyone knows, defined by Roy T. Fielding who recently gave SocialSite’s REST API a bit of a panning and then went on to give it to the OpenSocial specification. Now this must be quite hard to take and certainly makes me feel embarrassed of any supposed RESTful interfaces I’ve ever spec’ed (especially as I’m going to be reading his article and comments a few more times before I understand any of it). Thankfully, @snoopdave (who I’ve already linked to twice in this piece) appears to be taking this pretty well and has started a google-group discussion on how the OpenSocial API can be enhanced to meet Fielding’s criteria.
Good to see criticism being taken as constructive!
Well it appears I’ve gone and set up a blog, which is something of a surprise considering my usual attitude to this sort of thing. However, now that the deed is done, I may as well make the best of the situation.
The real reason I went through the rather arduous ‘sudo apt-get install wordpress‘ process was to have somewhere I could talk about technical things that currently interest me. Whether there is space in the world for another ill-founded spouting of opinions and misinformation is another matter.
I work as a web-application developer / architect for the BBC, with particular interest in open-social-web type things. This means I should probably caveat everything I say with the usual: ‘the opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the BBC‘.
