My company provides a Web service and does things in Java. We would like to expose our service and user data in an Atom-GData fashion.
Naturally, we are looking for ways to be as standard as possible, as well as to save coding and debugging time. I have looked for a Java GData server, and not found anything viable. (Lucene GData Server seems specialized and poorly supported.) We know about REST and about using the ROME library for parsing and generating feeds, so we could just code our own GData server. But I noticed that one category of GData - the Picasa / photos part - is exactly the functional area we want to start with. That raises an intriguing idea that our servlets might simply move data from our "pojo" model into the GData/Picasa client model, then have the latter do all Atom feed generation and parsing for us. We would be willing to adopt the built-in Picasa resource path structure, from /user on down. If it works, it seems like that would be the ultimate in GData / Picasa compatibility - and a time-saver. But of course, we'd need to know the answers to a lot of questions: 0) Is there really no viable Java GData server out there yet? 1) I can't be the first one to have had this idea. Is there a discussion thread here (or someplace else online) where people have explored this or done it before? I have done some searches and not come across it yet. 2) If I tell the GData / Picasa client to work with a base URL of "http://mycompany.com/my/toplevel-structure/{remaining picasa structure, starting with /user} - Will it? I mean, just as well as if I had told it "http://picasaweb.google.com/ data/feed/api/{remaining picasa structure, starting with /user}? Or must I find some other means of correct URL generation / substitution? 3) Are the Atom feeds generated by the GData and Picasa Java clients just as good "coming out" as "going in"? In other words: a) if a servlet (mis)uses the client library to spit out an Atom feed back to a real GData / Picasa client, will that feed be complete and robust enough to be perfectly understood by the real client as "the real stuff"? b) if a servlet (mis)uses the client library to read an Atom feed sent in by a real GData / Picasa client, is the client library robust enough to perfectly understand what it's taking in, so we can ultimately copy from Picasa extension objects into our pojos? 4) The GData / Picasa code seems to be under an Apache 2.0 license which would permit us to use it in such a fashion. Do I have that right? 5) Will my company find it reasonably easy (assuming our technical competence) to extend GData for future data types specific to our company? (Probably means subclassing GData's BaseFeed, BaseEntry, etc. classes.) Thanks! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Data API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-help-dataapi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
