Category Archives: Windows

Introducing WADL#

11 Replies

Of late I have been working on a small project which deals with C# code generation. I named it WADL# by the way most of the C#/.NET projects are names. If Apple products can start with i , GNOME with g, KDE with K and Windows with Win , then  I think WADL# is an apt name.

For all the people who have been working on .NET and web-services must be diving deep into SOAP based web-services. Right? How many of you know that SOAP based web services are not the only type of web-service which exist on this planet? How many of you have heard about RESTful web services? I know the fight between SOAP and REST is just like Emacs v/s Vim and GNOME v/s KDE and SQL v/s NoSQL. If someone worked on SOAP based web service, they must be familiar with WSDL. They added a “Web reference” and voila – Your IDE generated the client proxy for you.

For people in the RESTful world, don’t have something called WSDL. Sun came up with something called WADL. It is again a XML based representation of operations offered by the web-service. WADL doesn’t get so much of love since RESTful people are opposed to anything such as WADL. Whatever may be the case, WADL is still pending with W3C and not yet finalized. This makes the situation more complex for people from WSDL background who have been in a habit of getting their client proxy code. Hardly anyone looks at the actual XML. Why does it make the life tough? This is because I along with many people could not find any such code generators for WADL. After days of hunting I finally gave up.

I actually needed the WADL -> C# code generator as I wanted to write a client side proxy for Launchpad. After figuring out that LP provides a WADL, I started researching how to use it, but only in vain since no such code generators exist. This inspired me to write one of my own. I got the WADL schema, read the reference, sent some mails to launchpad-dev mailing list asking for clarification and finally came up with v0.1 of WADL#, download the assembly file.

I am still learning WADL and not everything is clear. There are many conflicts which might take time to grasp, but the current assembly works flawlessly for Launchpad WADL. Let me know if it fails for some WADL file which you provided. Take the pains to mail me the WADL file too. My email is mail at manishsinha dot net

Documentation:

This is no magic or rocket science. All you need to do it to call the Convert method of WadlConverter which implements IConverter interface. This means you need to use LpNet.WadlSharp.Common.WadlConverter class and call it’s Convert method. The signature of the method is

void Convert(string inputFileName, string outputFileName, string rootNamespace)

The explanation of the method:

  1. The first argument is the filename of the WADL file.
  2. Second argument is the filename of the .cs file. If the file does not exist, it would be created. If it does exist, it would be truncated and then overwritten.
  3. The third parameter is the name of the namespace which you would like the generated code to have.

Languages Supported:

WADL# uses CodeDom which is provided both in .NET and also Mono. WADL# can theoretically gen rate code for all languages which CodeDom can.

In reality, there is a small problem in the file Customizer.cs at line 215 where there is a hard coding for C#. Next release of WADL# will remove that.

Code:

WADL# uses Launchpad for development using the Bzr source control system. Get the code from trunk, make changes, push it and add it to merge queue. I love contribution and patches. :)

License:

WADL# is an open-source project released under MIT/X11/Expat License. This means you can use it freely any way you like it provided you do not remove the Copyright notice. Know more about MIT License.

–

Just now I got a mail from Softpedia informing me that they have added WADL# to their repository of Linux Softwares.

Please don’t start with Mono and patents talk. Please point your browser to Slashdot, Hacker News, OSNews and Reddit for such discussions. You’ll get better responses in such places.

Please let me know if there is any mistakes on this post which includes typos, grammatical and factual ones. I would correct it at the earliest.

Update: I just got a backlink from a blog at weblogs.java.net on a post titled Bumper Crop of WADL Tools

Disgusting App Store

11 Replies

Looks like I would again invite the wrath of fanbois on this post. Let’s see, but truth is truth and I cant’ resist from quoting it. Let’ start.

If you are missing some WTF news of late, have some of them here and here.

Let’s take the first example. Tweetie got rejected because Apple found some indecent words in the Twitter profile of Tweetie. Heck! There is no indecent words in the app itself. Now if the app developer says that the girl sitting next to her is sexy, get ready to face the wrath of Apple on your application.

Moving to second example, which would also make you scratch your head a hundred times.  They rejected a Bittorrent control app! Read it again you idiot. It’s not a Bittorrent app, but an app which can be used to control Transmission running on your desktop. Now it means that you aren’t downloading any illegal stuffs on your iPhone. You are just controlling it! Now even if that is illegal, the case is too weak!

Keeping up with the moral policing,  tomorrow Safari should be banned since it can also be used to download illegal content, that too on your holy iPhone, that too not remotely. The iPhone approval process sucks balls and how-so-ever you give excuses of legal and ethical and tons of other shit loads excuses, the fact is that App Store is a nightmare. It is under a Nazi’s rule and you got no right to speak. Admit it that Apple is God. If not, get out of here.

I am not a Microsoft fan, nor I was ever impressed with their ethics. Now I need to weight Apple and Microsoft. Speaking frankly, Microsoft respects developers even though they dis-respect the law. Apple considers developers  as second class citizen who are just here for bowing their heads. The reason why devs are still probably here is that Apple users pay for the app and due to the steady revenue stream.

I had written back about the screwed up App Store’s approval process when Opera got rejected and when they had a sucking NDA in place. If you want to judge the freedom you have at your disposal when you buy,think twice!