Re: The state of hydra

On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 16:38, Angelo Veltens <angelo.veltens@online.de>
wrote:

> Am 03.12.18 um 17:58 schrieb Lorenzo Moriondo:
>
> As I already mentioned here and for everybody interested, we are trying to
> grow the Hydra ecosystem with the help of Google Open Source Program and
> students/volunteers at https://github.com/HTTP-APIs for the sake of
> backend/APIs developers that wants to build and manage interconnected Web
> APIs. The initiative is in early stage and what we are trying to do for now
> is to make students aware of Semantic Web technologies while we define
> tools for easy API deployment.
>
> In particular the documentation entrypoint hydraecosystem.org
>
>
> I am aware of that, but I still do not get the connection between Hydra-CG
> and hydraecosystems.org. Is there a collaboration or it is technically
> the same? Why is hydraecosystems.org not mentioned on hydra-cg.com?
>
Hydra Ecosystem is part of the HTTP-APIs working group, it is endorsed by
Markus Lanthaler to use the specs in the context of Google Summer of Code;
it can be seen as the "operational" side of Hydra Community (which main
focus is on defining the specs and the W3C draft), it is meant to create
tools that can ease the adoption of Hydra-based solutions among present and
future API developers (in this early phase especially university students
thorough Google Summer of Code).

> What do you mean by ecosystem? This would be the hydrus server and
> Herakles.ts client? So whom could I ask about Herakles.ts? I did not get
> any answer on this mailing list.
>
Heracles.ts and the specs are future-proof designs but they are not
complete and/or ready for production usage (obviously anybody is free to
use anything in his/her production environments under own responsibility).
As any design it has to go through multiple iterations of implementation
phases to be tested and experimented to be cloud/production-ready, a
toolchain has to be created to ease the multi-step process of defining a
document, setting up an environment, deploying a server. The experiments
and the tools we are developing are meant to embed Hydra specs into
cloud-ready tools that can provide generic solutions to data connectivity
and data integration needs. hydrus can work with Heracles.ts or with any
other client that is based/inspired by Heracles.
The best people that can talk about Heracles are the contributors to the
code as they appear in Github or in "Github Issues" page for that
particular repository.

> Having a hydrus server does not help me building a Java Application that
> should expose a Hydra API, which is what I am experimenting with at the
> moment. What I need is a helpful spec, or at least some place to discuss
> and enhance the spec, if it is work in progress.
>
hydrus is a good example of how anybody can deploy an API server starting
form the a Hydra ApiDoc document. You can possibly quite easily port the
code to Java 8 using the functional tools provided (as hydrus is developed
in a functional-first Web frameworks called Flask; probably you will get a
better fit using Scala). For the client, there is no Java implementation
afaIk, but you can try starting from hydra-py to understand how to write
your own Java client by leveraging RDF libraries provided for JVM-based
languages.

If you need particular answers, you should try asking questions by
attaching code examples with problems you are encountering and I suppose
anybody would be glad to help.
Your issues are adoption issues, unfortunately is quite common for any
early-stage project to have such barriers like lack of examples and support
or stable packaged libraries; that's why the effort of the Hydra Ecosystem
to create tools and standard practices; for the moment, as Python
volunteers, we are doing this using Python but I hope as anybody that other
developers will join to widen the spectrum and provide support for multiple
technologies.

 Best regards,

> Angelo
>
Thanks for your interest.



-- 
¤ acM ¤
Lorenzo
Moriondo
@lorenzogotuned
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzomoriondo
https://github.com/Mec-iS