Here at arc90 we use the Restlet framework for Java REST web services. Recently, we’ve also been considering Spring for dependency injection and AOP within these services. Restlet 1.0.x provides an extension for Spring integration, but I had a hard time finding an example of its use, so I thought I would post one here.

DemoApplication Class

package com.arc90.demo;
import ...
/**
* Starts the Restlet application and defines its resources
*/
public class DemoApplication extends Application
{
private static final String RESOURCE_MAP = "resourceMap";
private static final int HTTP_PORT = 8182;
public DemoApplication(Context context)
{
super(context);
}
/**
* Initialize the application when this class is executed.
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args)
{
try
{
Component component = new Component();
component.getServers().add(Protocol.HTTP, HTTP_PORT);
DemoApplication application = new DemoApplication(component.getContext());
component.getDefaultHost().attach(application);
component.start();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
/*
* Convert any checked exceptions to unchecked for the purpose of this demo.
*/
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
/**
* Set up the spring-defined resources
*/
public Restlet createRoot()
{
Router router = new Router(getContext());
/*
* Retrieve a map of available resources from spring and attach each to the router
*/
ApplicationContext context =
new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[] { "applicationContext.xml" });
Map<String, Finder> resourceMap = (Map<String, Finder>) context.getBean(RESOURCE_MAP);
for (String key : resourceMap.keySet())
{
router.attach(key, resourceMap.get(key));
}
return router;
}
}

DemoResource Class

package com.arc90.demo;
import ...
/**
* Handles all requests to the demo resource.
*/
public class DemoResource extends Resource
{
@Override
public void init(Context context, Request request, Response response)
{
super.init(context, request, response);
getVariants().add(new Variant(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN));
}
@Override
public Representation getRepresentation(Variant variant)
{
return new StringRepresentation("Restlet Spring Integration Demo", MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN);
}
}

Spring applicationContext.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.5.xsd">
<util:map id="resourceMap">
<entry key="/demo">
<bean id="configurationFinder" class="org.restlet.ext.spring.SpringFinder">
<lookup-method name="createResource" bean="demoResource"/>
</bean>
</entry>
</util:map>
<!-- Resources classes -->
<bean name="demoResource"
class="com.arc90.demo.DemoResource" scope="prototype" />
</beans>

This uses Restlet’s built in HTTP server, so to access the demo resource, simply run DemoApplication, then point your browser to: http://localhost:8182/demo

As you can see, it takes a little non-Spring code to get Restlet up and running. However, the Resources themselves are Spring beans, so everything from the Resource level down can be wired by Spring.

Restlet version 1.1 (currently in testing) provides improved Spring integration where the entire Restlet framework can be configured in the Spring application context. I plan to post another quick tip demonstrating the 1.1 configuration soon.

Today I ran into an issue where the values being returned from datetime columns in my MSSQL database were unreadable by PHP’s strtotime() function.

Here’s what was happening: All the values were in this format: Aug 27 2007 12:00:00:000AM. This was problematic because PHP’s strtotime() function cannot parse dates where milliseconds are separated from the seconds by a colon rather than a period (dot).

At first, I was concerned about why this was happening and, according to a bug report on php.net, it was due to the combination of FreeTDS + php5.2.3 + MSSQL and their formatting of columns cast as datetime. Although it’s fixed in the trunk of PHP’s repository, it hasn’t made its way to a release. So, if you happen to run into this–here’s a solution:

strtotime(preg_replace("/:\d{3}([AP]M)$/", " $1", $timeStamp));

In this case, $timeStamp is equal to Aug 27 2007 12:00:00:000AM. So use preg_replace() to replace the milliseconds (:000) with a space and then puts the am/pm back at the end. Now strtotime() has a value that’s readable.

That’s it!