Bachelor Thesis on a RESTful API for a Groupware/OpenSocial

[Thomas Koch]

Hi,

please allow me to bring to your attention my just finished bachelor thesis on
the subject of the design of a restful API to be useful for a Groupware or the
person related informations of OpenSocial.

I'd appreciate any feedback. The text will be available under a free license
after I received the mark for it.

Points that might be of special interest for (some of) you:

- a modernized design of CalAtom/CardAtom[1] without the need for a new
"feature" property
- efficient synchronization of collections with restful HTTP
- properties of vCard useful (or missing) for OpenSocial
- use of OpenSearch for reports
- use of nice small value objects replacing some functionality of Jersey
(Java REST framework)
- a "resource facade" framework to support multiple "views" or media types of
the same data
- a minimal implementation of an atom pub server on top of Jersey

[1] http://robubu.com/?cat=2

http://github.com/thkoch2001/bachelor-
thesis/blob/master/latex/restful_groupware.pdf

Please be forgiving with the quality of my writing. It's a thesis written
under time pressure and other constraints and I'm not a writer.

Best regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro

[Eric J. Bowman]

Post by Thomas Koch
Please be forgiving with the quality of my writing. It's a thesis
written under time pressure and other constraints and I'm not a
writer.

I'll take a look at your work, as I've been meaning to look into
OpenSocial anyway, vis-a-vis REST of course. But I can't make any
promises to cut any slack on writing quality. Don't take it
personally, but I'm comprehending less and less of the "academic"
papers I'm asked to review, due to writing and document structure that
wouldn't have made it out of High School in my day, and this is from
honors students.

I blame both the deteriorating state of education, and SMS. I've read
plenty of theses over the years, they were all written under time
pressure and the constraints of living life, but in recent years the
writing quality has just gotten deplorable to the point that it isn't
just bad writing, but incomprehensible to I guess everyone but the
teachers and professors who let it slide. It isn't part of the
standardized testing, so it can't be all that important, seems to be
the student attitude we've created.

/rant

Since you warned me and asked nicely, I'll do my best to take the
attitude that you've been shortchanged by the system and behave myself,
unless I find something's really confusing.

-Eric