eXo Platform (Enterprise WebOS)

Let’s all chat on TSS thread

Ohloh is a cool tool that analysis Open Source projects code.

Many information is available such as the number of contributors over the last twelve months:

“Over the past twelve months, 90 developers contributed new code to eXo Platform.

This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh.

For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 92 developers have contributed.”

This is close to the Firefox size team and of course outperforms the competition:

“Over the past twelve months, 97 developers contributed new code to Mozilla Firefox. ”

The next graph shows the number of contributors to the projects over the last years, as you can see, Liferay Committers + Alfresco committers < eXo committers (note that Liferay + Alfresco offering is included in eXo stack)

This trend is also confirmed by the number of commits made over the last years for each projects.

Several other information are available like the project cost:

In other words, if you would have to produce the same amount of work (and that does not valuate the innovation here) you would have to spend 12M$…in the US

or the languages used,

During the official launch of the eXo Enterprise WebOS on a private boat in Paris, we had the pleasure to host a round table about the future of web applications.

All the market key players accepted our invitation and the show was great.

Note that the he video is in french and more than one hour long!

A special thanks to Christian Fauré who moderated this table, really great job Christian!

This is only one floor, we have another one like this :

I took some cheese from Creuse (my parent’s place in France).

Trong with his team finishing the release for Portal 2.0:

Photos of our VN office on flickr

No, We will not disclose the questions list yet… but just to say that the first draft of questions from Christian , who is moderating the table, are really high level. Expect a great show!

We will try to record the entire event for those who will not be able to attend.

I will be in Thailand for 2 weeks from the 3 to 18th of February. I will probably be the week-end in Bangkok. If you want to meet to talk about eXo or anything related, contact me on my mobile:  +33 6 71 25 15 49

The new version of eXo comes with a powerful REST framework following the guidelines defined in the JSR 311 specification (JAX-RS)

The idea of the REST framework is to provide a simple way to create server side APIs that allows to expose to third party systems most of the platform functionalities.

Note that that trend is extremely popular in the consumer web where corp like Yahoo or Google expose many services using the REST paradigm. Even the server side part of the new OpenSocial specification is REST based… and could be implemented using eXo REST framework!

1) Some samples

We have exposed several services using the framework from the low level layers like WebDAV to the higher one like providing a Facebook application using the REST framework to browse eXo Document Management repository.

Another sample is a REST service that expose all the contact of an eXo Collaboration Suite user. We also have a Flex based client that read the exposed XML and displays the contacts. The flex can be embedded inside a portlet, a widget or any other web application:

[Update]  I also paste a screenshot of the iGoogle gadget that allows to browse the document repository on eXo. It leverages the WebDAV protocol that itself is implemented over the REST framework

2) Technical aspects of the framework

So any eXo Java service can be exposed via REST, it just has to use Java annotations inside services to dynamically map an URL and Java entities.

One of the most important type of annotation is @URITemplate, applicable for TYPE and METHOD scope which define relative URL to expose given service via HTTP.

In simple cases, a RESTable method is uniquely addressed as a concatenation of a base URL, a TYPE scoped URITemplate annotation (if any) and a METHOD scoped URITemplate annotation. Parameters of the service can also be mapped to some elements of the URL as shown in the next code fragment. There an HTTP call to the URL “server.com/level1/toto/titi/tata” would directly invoke the method3 method with “toto”, “titi” and “tata” as the value of the 3 method arguments.

@URITemplate("/level1/{id1}/")
public class ResourceContainer_TEST implements ResourceContainer {

  @HTTPMethod("GET")
  @URITemplate("/{id2}/{id3}/")
  public Response method3(@URIParam("id1") String param1,
                                     @URIParam("id2") String param2,
                                     @URIParam("id3") String param3) {
    System.out.println("=== method3 called: id1 = " + param1);
    System.out.println("=== method3 called: id2 = " + param2);
    System.out.println("=== method3 called: id3 = " + param3);
    Response resp = Response.Builder.noContent().build();
    return resp;
  }
}

All HTTP methods like standard PUT, POST, DELETE ones can be used and referenced using the HTTPMethod annotation. A Response object is returned to the container, in our sample the Response does not contain anything; the ok method returns a 200 HTTP status code.

More complex URL template are also supported especially the one of type ?param1=value1&param2=value2 as shown in the next code fragment where the parameters are directly mapped to the method signature arguments:

@HTTPMethod("GET")
@URITemplate("/test/queryfilter/")
@QueryTemplate("method=method1&param1=param1")
@OutputTransformer(StringOutputTransformer.class)
public Response method1(@QueryParam("method") String method,
                                   @QueryParam("param1") String param1) {
  System.out.println(".. method=" + method);
  System.out.println(".. param1=" + param1);
  return Response.Builder.ok("method1", "text/plain").build();
}

Another important feature of that REST framework is the use of Transformer objects that can be easily plugged at the Response generation time.

In the previous example, the transformer class is a simple StringOutputTransformer that will convert the incoming object into a String output of type “text/plain”.

The framework contains several transformers that are ready to use such as XSLT4DOMOutputTransformer which takes a DOM element and will transofrm it using an XSL template file as shown in the next code fragment:

  @HTTPMethod("GET")
  @URITemplate("/test/xslt/{schema-name}/")
  @OutputTransformer(XSLT4DOMOutputTransformer.class)
  public Response method1(@URIParam("schema-name") String schemaName)
              throws Exception {
    Map p = new HashMap();
    p.put(XSLTConstants.XSLT_TEMPLATE, schemaName);
    Document d = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder()
        .parse(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader()
        .getResourceAsStream(”book-in.xml”));
    return Response.Builder.ok(d, “text/html”).setTransformerParameters(p).build();
  }

3) The Contact REST Service

The ContactRESTService is a simple sample of an eXo service method that is exposed through a REST API.

Any URL of type “server.com/contact/getContactList/benjamin” will return an XML fragment within the HTTP response that will contain the list of all benjamin’s contacts that are located in the Contact Manager application of eXo CS.

As you can see in the next fragment, the code is simple, we simply get the ContactService and call the getAllContact method on the current user

@URITemplate("/contact/")
public class ContactRestService implements ResourceContainer {

  private ContactService contactService;
  private ThreadLocalSessionProviderService sessionProviderService;

  public ContactRestService(ContactService contactService,
                                      ThreadLocalSessionProviderService sessionProviderService) {
    this.contactService = contactService;
    this.sessionProviderService = sessionProviderService;
  }

  @URITemplate("getContactsList/{username}/")
  @HTTPMethod(HTTPMethods.GET)
  @OutputTransformer(XMLOutputTransformer.class)
  public Response getContact(
      @URIParam("username") String username)
      throws Exception {
	  System.out.println("Entering getContact Rest Method");
	  System.out.println("Get Contact list for username :"+username);
	  SessionProvider sp = sessionProviderService.getSessionProvider(null);
	  java.util.List listcontact = contactService.getAllContact(sp, username);
	  Iterator listiterator = listcontact.iterator();
	  org.w3c.dom.Document d= DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().
                   newDocumentBuilder().newDocument();
	  Element contactlist = d.createElement(”contactlist”);

	  while (listiterator.hasNext())
	  {
		  Contact contactobj = listiterator.next();

		  Element contact = d.createElement(”contact”);
		  Element exoid = d.createElement(”exoid”);
		  Element fullname = d.createElement(”fullname”);
		  Element firstname = d.createElement(”firstname”);
		  Element job = d.createElement(”job”);
		  Element nickname = d.createElement(”nickname”);
		  Element mail = d.createElement(”mail”);
		  Element birthday = d.createElement(”birthday”);

		  exoid.setTextContent( contactobj.getId());
		  fullname.setTextContent( contactobj.getFullName());
		  firstname.setTextContent( contactobj.getFirstName());
		  job.setTextContent( contactobj.getJobTitle());
		  nickname.setTextContent( contactobj.getNickName());
		  mail.setTextContent( contactobj.getEmailAddress());
		  if (contactobj.getBirthday()!=null)
                    birthday.setTextContent(contactobj.getBirthday().toString());

		  contact.appendChild(exoid);
		  contact.appendChild(fullname);
		  contact.appendChild(firstname);
		  contact.appendChild(job);
		  contact.appendChild(nickname);
		  contact.appendChild(mail);
		  contact.appendChild(birthday);
		  contactlist.appendChild(contact);
	  }
	  d.appendChild(contactlist);

	  return Response.Builder.ok(d,”text/xml”).build();

  }
}

We had 4 birthday on Tuesday in Hanoi office.

Patrick (an eXo partner representative) and I have been kindly invited to the party organized just after work in a restaurant not far from the office.

Was a lot of fun…and quite some beers. It is really a pleasure to see how people like each other here, the good eXo spirit!

By the way, we are employing a lot there and if you want to join us, you are welcomed….I am pretty sure the working environment is one of the best in Viet Nam!

We continue our big marketing materials refreshment for the incoming launch of our new Enterprise WebOS product line.

We have already introduced you our new website, new brochure, new totems and even new beer.

Today we show you our new Polo T shirts:

And our new business cards, a bit more flashy than the previous ones, people can pick up the color they want

The printed materials are even better than the images. We are quite happy with all those new “goodies”.

We have tried, with our internal web design team (yes, all was made by us), to provide new ideas but when you take commons stuffs like Totems or Business Card, it is quite difficult to bring some innovation… but looks like the printer company was astonished with our models.

Involving our internal web design team is something critical as with the incoming release and the huge pipe, it is important to provide a consistent graphical marketing for our products but also for all the other documents we produce.

I am really proud of the artwork we have been able to add in all our work, this clearly makes the product so easy to sale….

I love to drink an eXo beer while eating an Alfresco’s “stake”. But I feel we eat too much pizza these days..