Featheast Lee 李羽东

Restlet is a handy tool for people to setup an environment running RESTful web service. In order to secure some endpoint resource, sometimes it will be required to use HTTPS for communication, and Restlet, no doubt, supports both of the two ways.

1) HTTP

It’s pretty easy to setup the HTTP environment, all you need to do is create a new component, and register the HTTP protocol into the component’s server and things will work out as expected.

Component component = new Component();
component.getServers().add(Protocol.HTTP, 8183);
component.getDefaultHost().attach(new XXXApplication());

Notice, the 8183 is the port number you have to provide.

2) HTTPS

Unlike HTTP, in HTTPS mode, you need provide three more things: keystore, keystorePassword, and keyPassword.

For those who are not familiar with keystore: A Java container of keys and certificates is called a keystore. There are two usages for keystores: as a keystore and as a truststore. The keystore contains the material of the local entity, that is the private key and certificate that will be used to connect to the remote entity. Its counterpart, the truststore, contains the certificates that should be used to check the authenticity of the remote entity’s certificates.

The steps to construct a keystore is detailed on the page: http://wiki.restlet.org/docs_2.0/13-restlet/27-restlet/46-restlet/213-restlet.html. Basically speaking, you need to use a SSL tool to generate keys first, then self-signed the certification. After all these steps finished,  following the code list below and you will run the HTTPS server successfully.

Component component = new Component();
Server server = component.getServers().add(Protocol.HTTPS, 8183);
server.getContext().getParameters.add(”keystorePath”, keystorePath);
server.getContext().getParameters.add(”keystorePassword”, keystorePassword);
server.getContext().getParameters.add(”keyPassword’, keyPassword);
component.start();

As the same theory, if you need to run any client side code as well under the same project, simply add the client’s support protocol to the component as:

component.getClients().add(Protocol.HTTPS);

Although Google is branded as a searching company, now it has come into every corner of IT world. I just realized that without Google, I will be kind of in a situation that cannot live comfortable any more.  Using Gmail to send and receive mails, using Google Docs to create, edit and share documents, using Google Calendar to arrange weekly and daily schedule, using Google Reader to read the latest information and news around, using Google Map to discover and explore neighborhood and destinations, using Google Buzz and Wave to socialize, and more importantly for me, using Google App Engine to earn money.

Recently, I have a thought to take participant in the open-source world, as a result the first thing came into my mind is to create some small project on the Google Code, which is previously dominated by SourceForge. After some attempting, I have constructed a very small project with the name of “restfulhttpclient”. It is written in Java, with the IDE of Netbeans 6.8. Consequently, the checking out code will in the structure in Netbeans.

It is not difficult to adopt Google Code as SVN repository, since it provides the most basic functions to host code, and once you have an account and create a project there, you just need simply using your familiar SVN client to commit and check out your code.

However, I do have some questions here, the one that confused me most is that why should I name my project in all lowercase characters. Some one may argue it will be easier for lowercase letters to display in the address URI and for people to type in, but I believe a simple mapping and checking mechanism will not be that hard.

Another thing is actually for each of the project, there are two different URIs mapping to this project. One in the format of ***.googlecode.com, and the other is code.google.com/p/***. Whenever you try to upload your file, it is better to choose the first one, since the latter one will give you a 400 bad request response.

All right, if you have some interest, try to download my project in a while ( not finished yet).

http://code.google.com/p/restfulhttpclient

The reason why it is called restful http client is simply because of I have to use those basic functions as work. As developing a project full of Restful web services, invoking a http request will be the most common task. A handy GUI tool will be really nice if it can covers those most usual functions. Even a lot of similar products are out there, I cannot find one that most suits me. Either some of them have too many capabilities that made them extremely difficult to master, or some just ignores certain part of the function that I have to use. In this project, users can send GET, POST, PUT and DELETE request to server, you can add specific headers, and basic authentication informations. The response code and message will also be displayed on the panel once received by the client.