Re: Linked Data content negotiation for Rack applications

On 26/05/2010 13:44, "Arto Bendiken" <arto.bendiken@gmail.com> wrote:

> As a follow-up to the `linkeddata` metadistribution of RDF.rb, I have
> also just released a first rough cut of the `rack-linkeddata` gem [1].
> 
> This gem is intended to provide a standard Linked Data content
> negotiation component for any Rack-compatible Ruby web applications
> (this includes e.g. all Rails 3.x and Sinatra applications), removing
> the need for these applications to concern themselves with either RDF
> serialization or HTTP header parsing.
> 
> Rack::LinkedData was inspired by and intended for Nicholas Humfrey's
> work with DBpedia lite [2], which is to be a first testing grounds for
> the gem.
> 
> You can install the gem as follows:
> 
>     $ sudo gem install rack-linkeddata
> 
> Using Rack::LinkedData in a Sinatra [3] application is particularly
> straightforward. Here follows a minimal complete RDF-based "Hello,
> world!" application [4] using Ruby, RDF.rb, Sinatra and
> Rack::LinkedData:
> 
>     #!/usr/bin/env ruby -rubygems
>     require 'sinatra'
>     require 'rack/linkeddata'
> 
>     use Rack::LinkedData::ContentNegotiation
> 
>     get '/hello' do
>       RDF::Graph.new do
>         self << [RDF::Node.new, RDF::DC.title, "Hello, world!"]
>       end
>     end
> 
> Given its brevity, it's probably self-evident what this application is
> supposed to do, even if you're not familiar with Sinatra or RDF.rb.
> 
> If you have Sinatra installed, you can run this example application as
> follows:
> 
>     $ ruby -rubygems hello.rb
> 
> After Sinatra boots up (on port 4567 by default), you can use `curl`,
> or a similar tool like `wget` and `fetch`, to test out the content
> negotiation:
> 
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: text/plain" http://localhost:4567/hello
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: text/turtle" http://localhost:4567/hello
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://localhost:4567/hello
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:4567/hello
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: application/trix" http://localhost:4567/hello
>     $ curl -iH "Accept: */*" http://localhost:4567/hello
> 
> ...and so on - you get the idea. Some more details can be found in the
> README [5].
> 
> This Rack middleware is going to be deployed on a number of production
> sites over the next few days, which should work out any kinks it still
> has. It's our hope that it will in time become a dependable and easy
> way to plug in Linked Data content negotiation into any Rails
> application in particular.

Fantastic work Arto :)

Standards compliant content negotiation has always been a pain to implement
and this makes it super-simple. Looking forward to using this in dbpedia
lite. This will really help keep down the amount of code in the controller.


nick.


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Received on Wednesday, 26 May 2010 13:28:50 UTC