Blogging Roller

Via The Aquarium I see that Mark Hadley's work on Web Application Description Language (WADL) is now a Sun Technical Report. WADL provides a way to describe a REST based web application or service so that tools can discover services, generate proxies, etc. As I understand it, WADL is to REST as WSDL is to SOAP.

There's also something new since the last time I looked at WADL. Mark has added a section on the Atom protocol and examples that show how to use a WADL file to replace an Atom introspection document. Looks like good stuff to me. If you need an introspection doc for your REST based web service, why not use WADL?

Via Google, I found that there's also a WADL presentation on-line.

I've got  to admit, I'm itchin' to start using the JDK 5.0 features. I want to see how EJB3/Annotations stack up against the Hibernate/XDoclet setup I've been using for years now in various projects. And I'd love to check out Xzajo's new Hibernate plugin for Netbeans 5.5. But I can't do that at work because Roller is still stuck in JDK 1.4.2 land. I can development, test and deploy using JDK 5.0, but we're still keeping the Roller code-base 1.4.2 compatible. Sigh.

And that reminds me. Hibernate itself is becoming something of a plugin. Why? Because Hibernate is providing an implementation of the Java pesistence API.

For example, if Roller used the Java persistence API instead of the Hibernate API, we could eliminiate our Hibernate dependency and still allow Roller users to continue to use Hibernate. We'd be coding against an API with multiple implementations: the Hibernate EJB3 implementation under the LGPL, the Glassfish EJB3 implementation under the CDDL and someday the Geronimo EJB3 implementation under the Apache license. We could plug-out Hibernate and plug-in something else. Plus, we be waving good-bye to JDK 1.4.2 -- a very nice side-effect.

Neil Young is offering a free stream of his new album today only: Living With War. And while you wait for a connection/stream, check out Code Monkey (heard it on the MacCast).