RESTlet and JSR-311

Like many others I’ve been playing around with REST, an HTTP-based convention for performing CRUD calls against resources. One thing I’ve done is download RESTlet, a Java implementation of a REST framework. Of course, one concern in the tech world is that you’ll choose some approach only to discover that a competing technology disrupts the marketplace of ideas, or that an alternate approach becomes a standard. In the case of Java and REST the proposed standard is JSR-311. Looking back on it, I got lucky, in that I didn’t see any specific mention of JSR-311 on the RESTlet site, but I didn’t care: I was just playing around and wanted to see how light (or heavy) the framework was. Today I serendipitously found a mention of RESTlet and JSR-311 on the Noelios site here. If you’re looking for an example to get your feet wet, then try the RESTlet wiki, which has a short sample bit here.

So, in the words of Bill Murray, it’s got that going for it.

Paul Graham on Programming Language Design

Some of you know that Paul Graham of ViaWeb/Yahoo Stores fame has been released his work-to-date. The response has been underwhelming(!), so much so that he felt compelled to respond to some of his detractors. After waxing lyrical on the beauties of append in Prolog last week, though, it was this paragraph that sank my battleship:

“This is one reason the source code of Arc itself is so short, incidentally. I did the same thing to it. But my first priority was making applications shorter, not the language. There are features, most notably Prolog-style pattern-matching, that seem to promise great savings in length, but turn out only to be useful for writing a few basic sequence operations like append, remove, and so on. Prolog is a great language for writing append; after that it’s all downhill.”

Ouch! Still, his arguments make for a good read of language design motivation and issues.

Scala

This is mainly a test to confirm that WordPress respects the pre tag such that I can post code snippets and that WordPress’ functionality works.

package fibonnaci;

object RecursiveFibonnaci {

    // Fibonnacci using if/else.  Note implicit return
    def fib(n: int): int = {
        if (n == 0)  0
        else if (n == 1) 1
        else fib(n-2) + fib(n-1)
    };
}

That’s a simple example of the Fibonnaci function with and .