We launced the Creative Commons Web
Services several months ago. At the
time, the goal was to provide a “beta” experience, as well as one that
would power “ccPublisher’s” license chooser. At the time, we planned to
develop both SOAP and REST implementations, but left the SOAP
implementation incomplete due to time constraints. It’s been on my list
to finish “real soon now” ever since.
In the meantime, let’s review the CC web services scorecard:
- used them in ccPublisher… check.
- implemented a Python demo application… check.
- answered questions from a few random developers about the REST
version… check.
- answered questions about the SOAP version… uh, one.
The one developer who asked me about the SOAP version was a Java
developer who wanted to use the WSDL definition to make life easier.
That I can sympathize with. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t
currently have the bandwidth to finish and maintain two separate
implementations. We’re working on finalizing the API for the web
services, and as part of that discussion are talking about dropping SOAP support.
Over the weekend Mike pointed me to
an
interview
with Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Flickr. In it he
describes a similar phenomenon to what we’ve observed (although on a
much larger scale): far more interest in REST than SOAP. 
That interview, coupled with our previous internal conversations,
prompted me to investigate just what would go into implementing support
for our REST web services in Java.
After a full day of hacking, most of it spent trying to figure
out how to do XPath queries in Java, I have two things to show for it.
First, an SWT demo which uses the CC REST web service to generate a
simple license chooser.
The other, probably more important development, is a wrapper class,
CcRest, which wraps the web services calls and is (hopefully) suitable
for use in other Java applications. CcRest currently depends on
JDOM and Jaxen for it’s XML
and XPath functionality. The demo app, RestDemo, relies on the SWT UI
library. The source code is available as a Jar and in CVS from the CC
Tools Project at
SourceForge. I’ll be adding some documentation to the CC Developer
Wiki as well. I’ll be
the first to admit that I’m not all that proficient in Java, so if
anyone has suggestions or improvments, I’ll be happy to hear about them.
| date: | 2005-02-08 09:28:01 |
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| wordpress_id: | 258 |
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| layout: | post |
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| slug: | using-java-with-cc-web-services |
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| comments: | False |
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| category: | development |
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