Saturday 9 May 2009

Ruby on Rails

To show how - and if :) - EXPRESS works, I will implement a prototype of the approach and test it on some use cases. I want to use a REST framework to make things easier. There are some REST frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Restlet. I started by reading about Ruby on Rails, from what I read I understood it has simplifying assumptions that might conflict with my requirements for example:
  • Every item is either a list or a item in the list which may not work out for some resources like: Order123/hasDateTime
  • IDs of the items must be numbers.
  • Exchanged formats is either in XML or key-value pairs
  • No linking between resources
There may be a workaround these problems but they aren’t straight forward. So I chose Restlet, and for now it seems OK. It is a Java API for modelling resources and responding to HTTP requests, it offers a lot more but these are the features that I am concerned with right now. Another good thing is that I’ll also be using Jena, so doing everything in Java may simplify things. Something in Restlet may cause a problem though, it doesn’t have OWL/RDF in the representations’ MediaTypes. However, there is RDF/XML, I am not sure if it will work instead.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Areeb,

    Regarding Restlet, you can create your own MediaType instances for OWL, no problem at all. Integration with Jena should work fine as well.

    Note that a RDF extension was added recently, check the Restlet snapshots.

    Best regards,
    Jerome

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  2. Thank you very much Jerome,

    I'll check that out

    Best Regards,

    Areeb

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