Conzilla and Collaborilla go REST

I just released Conzilla 2.2.2 together with Collaborilla 1.1. The biggest improvement of these versions is the switch to RESTful web services, which makes it finally possible to access Collaborilla even in very restrictive networks – the new services use standard HTTP port 80 which shouldn’t be a problem anymore. To make the picture complete, I also added support for HTTP proxies, so there is no excuse anymore for not being able to use Conzilla.

The noteworthy changes since version 2.2.1:

• Support for Collaborilla 1.1 and the new RESTful web services
• Support for connections through HTTP proxies
• Possibility to conditionally empty the disk caches
• Fix for problem on MacOS which prevented to open URLs in web browsers
• Fixed some NullPointerExceptions

Go and get it. Or if you already have an older version: just launch it via Java Web Start, the upgrade should then take place automatically.

Attachments with SOAP

Just read an article on how to send (binary) attachments with SOAP.

One described approach is to include the data as MIME or Base64 encoded CDATA blocks. Another possibility is to attach the binary data outside the SOAP message (like it is done in emails). Finally the author talks about SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), which is supposed to fix the problem.

Well, MTOM has to be understood by the server and the client, which means we have to find a proper implementation etc. Why all this hassle? If it is necessary to send such data, it would perhaps make sense to think of using a Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) like RESTful Web Services. This doesn’t mean that it is necessary to switch over completely from a SOA to a ROA, but both techniques could complement each other in RPC-heavy systems. In other cases I would try to avoid using SOAP and focus on resources instead.