Stefan Arentz

It’s been quiet here but that doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting still. I’ve been quite busy actually.

Currently I’m working on a simple framework that needs to become Polar Rose’s standard way to do (public) web services. It is modelled after Amazon’s Query-style web services that they use for things like SQS and EC2 where the invokation is basically a simple GET with traditional CGI encoded parameters. Except that I don’t return responses in XML but in JSON, which I find much more easy to deal with from the client side.

Here is a simple example. This is the source code for a simple SayHello action:

public class SayHelloAction implements WebServiceActionHandler
{
    private String name;

    @WebServiceParameter
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public Object execute() throws ActionHandlerException {
        return "Hello, " + name + "!";
    }
}

This translates to a call like this:

http://localhost:8080/api
  ?Action=SayHello
  &Name=Stefan
  &Timestamp=2007-11-07T10%3A07%3A33%2B00%3A00
  &AccessKey=TestAccount
  &Version=2007-10-10
  &SignatureVersion=1
  &Signature=V9G6XhL%2BW6vQDNIcs9O%2F%2FEufSzQ%3D

And returns a response that looks like this:

{
  "response": "Hello, Stefan!",
  "webServiceCallId":"?5EE80743-6B11-434B-93C8-193AF5EF2F78"
}

I’m now finishing the work to support more complex types beyond String and fixing some validation issues. I’ll post a more complex example when that is done.

If you are interested in following this code then check it out at Google Code. It’s a little rough at the moment but I will guarantee that this will shine when we take it into production here.