Question

I need to design a RESTful application which allows me to access the people’s contact information from Facebook.

I stored the First name, last name, email address in the database. For the UI I will use Dojo to display the data.

But I don’t know how to design the middle layer to retrieve the data and how to pass it to the Dojo/javascript.

I have done J2EE development and used Struts framework. I know in J2EE, I can create entities beans, and then pass the information to the UI layer through the session beans.

But in a RESTful application, what type of classes do I need to use to accomplish what the entities and session beans can do?

Are there any books that can help me get up to speed ASAP?

Answer 1

I have done this quite rapidly (although I think that there are better ways) with the following steps:

1. Created the RESTful web services from db using NetBeans’s wizard: http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/websvc/rest.html

2. In Dojo, I have used dojo.xhrGet specifing the url of the service, handleAs: “json”

   dojo.xhrGet({
        url: myURL,
        handleAs: "json",
        headers: {"Content-Type": "application/json; charset=uft-8", "Accept" : "application/json"},
        load: function(responseObject) {
            myList = responseObject;
        }
   });
   

3. I have read one by one the items in the list and added to a dojo.data.ItemFileWriteStore by using newItem method
4. I have added the store to a dojox.grid.DataGrid