Tuesday, February 26, 2013

RHQ 4.6 released


As I've mentioned before, the RHQ team has been very busy since RHQ 4.5.1 (and actually already before that) and has switched the application server it uses to JBoss AS 7.1. Directly after the switchover we have posted a first alpha version.


Now after more work and fixes, we are happy to provide the release 4.6 of RHQ, that has all the issues resolved that arose from the switch. Features of this release are:

  • The internal app server is now JBossAS 7.1.1
  • GWT has been upgraded to version 2.5
  • There is a new installer (this has also changed since the 4.6 alpha release)
  • The REST-Api has been enhanced
  • Korean translations have been added (contributed by SungUk Jeon)
  • Webservices have been removed
  • Building RHQ now requires Java7, but it will still run on Java6
.

See the full release notes for details. They also contain a list of commits.

You can download the release from source forge.


As mentioned above, the old installer is gone, so make sure to read
the wiki document describing how to use the new installer.

Maven artifacts are available from the JBoss Nexus repository and should soon also be available from Central.

We also like to say thank you to our contributors for this release:

  • Jürgen Hoffmann
  • Richard Hensman
  • SungUk Jeon


Please give us feedback, be it in Bugzilla, Mailing lists or the forum. Or just join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net/#rhq.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Best practice for paging in RESTful APIS (updated)?

In the RHQ-REST api, we return individual objects and also collections of objects. Some of those collections are rather small (number of platforms), while others can grow a lot (number of resources in total or number of alerts fired). For the latter it is advised to do some paging and not return the full result set in one go. Some of the reasons are:
  • Memory consumption in server and client
  • Bandwidth need to transfer the data.
  • Latency to transfer huge amounts of data over slow networks


Inside RHQ we have the concept of a PageList<?> where an internal PageControl object defines the page size and other criteria like sorting. The PageList then only contains the objects from a certain page. I think this is a pretty common setup.

And here is where my question comes:

What is the "best-practice" to represent such a PageList in a RESTful api? So far I have seen two major ways:
  1. Add a Link: header that contains the prev and next relations. This is what RFC 5988 suggests and what projects like AeroGear use. The advantage here is that the body still contains the "raw" data and not meta data. And for both cases of 'single' object and 'collection' the data is at the 'root' of the body. Also paging is available for HEAD requests.

    On the other hand, it may get a bit harder for some client code (JavaScript, jQuery) to access the header and make use of the paging links
  2. Put the prev and next relations in the body of the request next to the collection. This has the advantage that there is no need to parse the http header. Disadvantage is that the real payload is now shifted "one level down" for collections.


    I sort of see the paging links as meta-data and think that this should not be mixed with the payload. Now a colleague of mine said: "Isn't that a state change link for the collection like the 'rel=edit' for a single object?". This sounds odd, but can't be denied.

Actually I have also seen mentioning the use of cookies to send the paging information, but that looks very non-transparent to me, so I am not considering this at all.

Just to be clear: I am explicitly talking about paging of collections and not about affordances of individual objects.

So are there established best practices? How do others do it?

If going for the Link: header: would people rather like to see multiple Link headers (see RFC 2616), one for each relation:

Link: <http://foo/?page=3>; rel='next'
Link: <http://foo/?page=1>; rel='prev'

or rather the combined way:

Link: <http://foo/?page=3>; rel='next', Link: <http://foo/?page=1>; rel='prev'

that is listed in RFC 5988?

[update]

I just saw that URLConnection.getHeaderField(name) does not support the multiple Link: headers as it only returns the last occurrence:

If called on a connection that sets the same header multiple times with possibly different values, only the last value is returned.


While there may be other ways to access all the Link: headers, this is a too obvious pitfall, that can be prevented by not using that style.