Build a RESTful Web Service in Just a Minute - Part 2

This article is the followup to the post Build a RESTful Web Service in Just a Minute, which showed how to build a REST web service which returned a person record from a database.

This article will show you how you can write and deploy another one-minute web service - this one maintains the person table and in subsequent articles we will see AjaxToaster services that handle complex data structures such as you might find in real world applications.
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Build a RESTful Web Service in Just a Minute

This article will show you how you can write and deploy a RESTful web service (that does something useful!) in around a minute.

It is planned to be the first part in a series of articles that will use AjaxToaster to demonstrate RESTful web services interacting with a relational database. In this first article we will show you a service that retrieves a simple data structure, in subsequent articles we will move onto a service that updates data and then services that handle complex data structures such as you might find in real world applications.
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We decided that one of the biggest things missing from ajaxToaster was formal descriptions of the web services. Historically WSDL has been used to describe the operations and input/output messages for WS web services, but If you’ve ever looked at a WSDL document, you’ll understand why we have decided to implement Kris Zyp’s JSON service-mapping-description proposal instead. Read the rest of this entry »

The Smell of Burning XML - Introducing XMLToaster

Java can be a very blunt tool when it comes to working with XML - there are lots of concepts to understand, lots of APIs to learn, and lots of code to write. Even when you have made it through the concepts and APIs you’ve only made it to the starting line!
Now you need to get some data to go with your XML, which often means learning yet another API to integrate with your relational database!

In this article I will explain how the XMLToaster can simplify the process of working in the XML and relational database worlds, without giving away any of the power and flexibility of either.
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We have reviewed how persistance is managed in v1.0.8.
The xmltosql parser has been rewritten to support a more human readable psuedo-sql syntax in addition to the current XML configuration.

An example of updating a table with the new, simplified syntax: If this is the xml message to save to the database….

<message>
    <dish  id=12>
        <dishname>Dry  Toast</dishname>
        <dishtype>MAIN</dishtype>
        <prices>
            <retail>1.50</retail>
            <wholesale>0.05</wholesale>
        </prices>
    </dish>

    <dish  id=14>
          :
          etc
          :
    </dish>
</message>


Then the xmltoaster update statement you would need is…

 update table menu using (update)
 set
  dishid = {message.dish.@id, key:1 },
  dishname = {message.dish.dishname, type:'string'},
  dishtype = {message.dish.type, type:'string'},
  price = {message.dish.prices.retail }
 ;
 onError('Error updating the menu table!!.', abort, rollback);


Easy, huh?