I'm thinking about a couple changes which would improve this mechanism a
bit. First, I think the whole ContentInfo thing should go and it should
just use the Content object instead.
Second, I think instead of making ContentProvider so high level, it
could be modeled after the Provider interface a bit more. This
ContentProvider would continue to handle the work of manging the
Collection, but it would provide access to the Request/ResponseContext.
There could then be an AbstractSimpleContentProvider which looks like
ContentProvider does now. This would allow more low level access to the
Entry/Feed/etc when needed.
This would mean there would be essentially 3 levels:
1. Provider - manages the whole APP service
2. ContentProvider (maybe better called CollectionProvider?) &
WorkspaceInfo: These provide metadata about the workspace and back the
collcetions
3. AbstractSimpleContentProvider - provides simple APIs like "T
getEntry(String id)" which users could override.
Regards,
- Dan
James M Snell wrote:
Dan, very cool to see you thinking through this stuff. Give me a couple
of days to stew on it and I'll post some thoughts next week.
- James
Dan Diephouse wrote:
Hi All,
I think there is some agreement that server side development needs to be
made a bit easier. This last week I've been hacking on a way to make it
as easy as possible, yet still be fairly extensible. I think its a
rather naive first attempt and I don't know if I've succeeded at all, so
I was hoping to get some feedback.
The basic idea is that you write against the ContentProvider interface
and "fill in the blanks". I.e.
BlogProvider extends ContentProvider<BlogEntry> {
public String getTitle(BlogEntry b) {
return b.getName();
}
....
}
It is FAR from done. For instance:
1. No exception handling of any kind - i.e. no way to throw a 404
2. Doesn't provide ways to map things like categories or other metdata
on the entry.
3. Resolver/Provider URL handling needs to come together somehow (per my
previous thread)
4. I have no idea if this is even conformant to the atompub spec, I'm
really just making this up as I go along - so it could seriously suck.
How IDs are supposed to work is particularly fuzzy. (I know I have to
read that part of the Atompub spec soon, but I wanted to get this out
here for feedback)
5. The example/test is a very naive attempt to figure out what it would
be like to expose a customer database over AtomPub.
6. Not sure I like how the classes are named
7. Apache license headers aren't in tack, figure it needs more work
anyway before committing
Code is here:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ABDERA-63
Cheers,
- Dan
PS I'm gathering that the conversion stuff James recently committed may
play along with the whole idea of simplifying things a bit for server
side developers. James: any chance you can give us a run down of the
ideas behind it?
--
Dan Diephouse
MuleSource
http://mulesource.com | http://netzooid.com/blog
