Discussions on the Restlet Framework project!

[jlouvel]

👋 Welcome!

While the official forum remains this Mailing List, we'll be experimenting with GitHub Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community. We hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we
  build together 💪.

To get started, comment below with an introduction of yourself and tell us about what you do with this community.

[Tembrel]

Tim Peierls here, long-time user of Restlet. Over the years I contributed various ideas, advice, and bits of code, including what became the Guice-Restlet extension (which should have been called the javax.inject-Restlet extension, but that's another story). My blog is woefully out of date, but it does describe some of my contributions.

Seat Yourself, the tiny company that I founded with a friend nearly two decades ago, provides an online ticketing service for school and community performing arts groups. The service is fundamentally Restlet-based, consisting of a single Component running co-operating Applications. We're using Restlet Framework 2.4.3 running under Tomcat 8.5 / Java 8 in an AWS Elastic Beanstalk cluster.

[jlouvel]

Thanks Time for sharing your Restlet story and your continued contribution to the project!

For the org.restlet.ext.guice extension, would it make sense to rename it to org.restlet.ext.inject in the upcoming 2.5 version?

[Tembrel]

Ha, yes, only about 10 years late!

[kerbymart]

Hi @Tembrel what do you think of a new Dagger2 extension: #1411

[Tembrel]

Rather than create a new extension for every javax.inject implementation out there, I think it would be better to add support within the org.restlet.ext.inject extension. I regret that this extension was originally named org.restlet.ext.guice, because the intent was to provide examples of how to get resources injected under any javax.inject-compliant system. I focused on Guice because I was using (and still use) Guice.

I'm not at all sure this stuff rightly belongs in an extension in the first place. Apart from ServerResource instances, the creation of which is handled by Finder machinery, the user is responsible for constructing all other Restlet classes, which makes Restlet a fine candidate for dependency injection. That's what this section of the extension docs is about.

The goal, as I see it, should be to allow the use of javax.inject annotations with any reference to a particular dependency injection framework confined to a small piece of configuration code.

[kerbymart]

@jlouvel Hello, I think creating a repository in the Restlet Github dedicated to "app starts" would be beneficial. This would allow developers who cannot contribute to the framework itself (the "users") to contribute by creating quick-start apps for JEE, GAE, and other modules. For example, a good start would be to have a "restlet/restlet-examples" repository.

[jlouvel]

Hi @kerbymart Thanks for the initiative, We do have an existing org.restlet.example module inside the main repository that has a similar purpose that that would benefit from a clean-up and probably becoming a separate repository as you suggest. Developing and incorporating additional targeted examples to get users started sounds beneficial.

[xSAVIKx]

Hey @jlouvel, that's great to see something happening in the framework! I hope there'd be some opportunity for the community to be more involved into the development and maybe faster release cycles.

I have a fork of my own that I had to create to fix some things and update dependencies. One thing I guess may be of interest is migration to maven-based deployments compared to ant-based ones. I'd be glad to donate that part to the main repo while I already have both maven central and github packages deployments ready and implemented here.

Let me know if that's smth worth back-merging.

[xSAVIKx]

I've also migrated builds to GH actions while Travis seems a bit less stable/easy to use approach nowadays

[jlouvel]

Hi @xSAVIKx thanks for the feedback and opportunity to contribute your code back.

We have started to work on the Mavenified build on 2.5 branch but are far from done, so your contribution would be very timely.

Have you had a JCA signed already?
If not that could be a great step to take so we don't have to redevelop those wheels.

I'll send a formal message to the community to share our plans and seek feedback and contributions soon. Stay tuned

[xSAVIKx]

Yeah, I've glanced that you already have done a big chunk of it 👍

I'm not sure I understood what you meant by Have you had a JCA signed already?. What does that mean?
Are you asking if the deployed jars are signed when being deployed to the central? If so - yes, the signing is part of the maven build.

What is the best way to contribute? Just opening a PR into the 2.5 would be ok?

[jlouvel]

Here is the page that explains what a JCA is and how to download and return it. Thanks and let us know if you have any question!
https://github.com/restlet/restlet-framework-java/wiki/Contribute

In term of the code contributing, providing a PR on the branch would be ideal. @thboileau is currently working on restoring a few additional modules from 2.4, but we could already complete the Maven build as you have already explored in your fork.

[xSAVIKx]

Hey @jlouvel, I created this PR with the changes I think are relevant. You guys did a great job moving most of the things already 👍

Please let me know if you're interested in reviewing/merging that PR and how can I share the signed JCA with you guys.