Comments on: Not enough is RESTful in RestFaces

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:00:26 +0000

The RESTfaces framework has helped me overcome some major obstacles with the application that I wrote. Don’t be so hard on it. It covers the main functionality of sending a request to a JSF application from a bookmarkable page.

JBoss is just pure crap. I tried to install it and had many, many problems. That was even before I tried to even install Seam which is worse. STAY AWAY!!

By: Alberto Gori

Alberto Gori — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:39:36 +0000

Hi, I am a RestFaces developer.
I admit my mistake (initially I called it ActionFaces then someone suggested me restfaces).
Anyway the TheServerSide post doesn’t speak about REST applications, but ok the name and some old part of documentation briefly report that misused word.

mAnyway thanks to your post I’ll try to bring a support for URI templates in RestFaces.
I have to think about Content negotiation instead…I don’t think it can be RestFaces feature..

Alberto Gori.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:21:34 +0000

Gavin,

You’re right about the fact that Seam absolutely does not claim to be a RESTfui framework. I have updated the post to make that more clear.

Ryan-

By: Gavin

Gavin — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:55:58 +0000

Oh, and P.S. I know what REST is, it’s you who have not done your research.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:52:30 +0000

Actually URI patterns are quite trivial to support using something like UrlRewriteFilter. You can see an example of this in Seam Wiki, for example on in.relation.to. (Personally, I don’t quite see how “human-friendly” URLs has anything to do with the principles of REST, but let’s just let that one by, since I certainly can’t be bothered arguing the point.)

Content negotiation is something that I would like to see built-in to Seam, (there is an existing feature request for that in JIRA), but this is another thing that is *very* easy to implement in your application, JSF doesn’t get in your way at all here.

AFAIK, the case of DELETE is similar. ie. there is no built-in support, but there is also nothing that gets in your way of assigning a special semantic when the method on a non-faces request is DELETE instead of GET.

But, what I really want to point out is that Seam definitely does *not* claim to be a REST framework, or to “support REST”, or “to create RESTful applications”, or anything like that. The only claim we make on our website is the following:

“Seam even adds facilities for handling bookmarkable (REST-style) web pages - the number one user complaint against JSF.”

So please don’t tar Seam with the same brush as other products. I encourage you to search our documentation and web site, you won’t find anything inaccurate there. The link you provided is to a discussion of an *example* application, which is indeed RESTful, not to any claims that in general “Seam … makes RESTful applications”. So please post a correction. Thanks in advance.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:16:55 +0000

“RESTful” seems to mean whatever the fanatic of the day says it means (i.e. do it my way you unRESTful sinner, or else). The magical qualities of the wonderful internet in its perfect state with everyone GETting and PUTting and POSTing and DELETE-ing never seems quite clear in substance, but *sigh*, I guess since the web has been such a huge story of failure without half (yes, half) of those commands, that we really need to get RESTful in order to fix it.

BTW, URI templates work great on just about any system with a simple rewriter module, which is what the Seam peeps suggest. Either way, its all just zealotry anyway.