Dustin's Bookmarks - 31 May 2009 (REST, Java, and JRuby)

I found four resources linked to from DZone to be particularly interesting this week. I am linking to them in this post as a form of glorified bookmark for my own future reference and in case someone else has not seen them already.


Five Things I Used to Forget About Java

The blog post Five Things I Used to Forget About Java could be useful to anyone returning to Java development, anyone new to Java development, or anyone who has not used one the items discussed for a while. The post covers Java approaches for converting String to Integer, use of the ternary operator, instanceof keyword versus Class.isInstance method, implementing comparators, and obtaining the number of command-line arguments passed into a main function.


Is It JRuby?

The useful online tool Is It JRuby? helps deal with the question of whether a particular Ruby gem will work with JRuby. Although many Ruby gems do work well with the JRuby implementation, some Ruby gems (especially the C-based ones) only run with other, non-JRuby implementations of Ruby. This community-driven site helps organize which Ruby gems work with JRuby. I plan to mention this resource in my Colorado Software Summit 2009 presentation Applied JRuby.


RESTGate - Web Client for REST Resources

The online tool RESTGate - Web-Based Client for REST-based Web Services appears to be an easy-to-use (no setup) browser-based client for performing simple testing of and interaction with REST-based web services. I will likely blog on this in more detail in the future and will almost certainly mention this tool in my Colorado Software Summit 2009 presentation RESTful Java.


sqlREST

The sqlREST project looks like an interesting one. This project benefits from use of Java standards, running on Java EE servlet containers and connecting to multiple databases via appropriate JDBC drivers. The goal of this project is to allow easy exposure of database entries via REST-style web services. Like the other Thomas Bayer tool mentioned above (RESTGate), I plan to mention sqlREST as part of my RESTful Java presentation.