ECF provides some additional REST

ECF was very fortunate to have 4 Google Summer of Code projects coming out of the summer of 2009. All of these innovative codebases will make it into ECF itself...and more importantly we have gained several excellent new committers.

Coming out of the GSOC project, we've just finished a major refactoring of the REST API, to make it simpler, smaller, as well as better integrated with ECF remote services.

The integration with ECF remote services is particularly interesting, because it provides both proxy-based/synchronous invocation, as well as full support for asynchronous invocation patterns (i.e. asynchronous-with-listener-callback and futures). With the integration with ECF remote services, the choice of synchronous/asynchronous invocation comes for free for all REST-based remote services. See here to get the REST projects and use the API.

We are working on example code, and invite contributions from community members to this effort...so that we can continuously improve/simplify the API through community feedback, as well as get a wide range of example code and documentation from existing and new REST-based services. See the ecf-dev mailing list for feedback/discussion/coordination.

The current test code uses the popular Twitter REST API...as an example of using the API to interoperate with non-OSGi, non-Eclipse, perhaps non-Java web service (I don't know/care how the Twitter service is actually implemented...which is what protocol-level interoperability is about).