Author: Florin

A Comparison of Places APIs

Location Based Services are all the rage these days. The space is still being defined and the players are trying to differentiate their service offerings in order to attract the critical mass of developers. In this post I’ll draw a side-by-side comparison of the main features provided by the major Places API providers today. While… Continue reading A Comparison of Places APIs

Towards An Open Database of Places: Location Autodiscovery

A short while back I read a challenging article titled t’s Time For An Open Database Of Places. There, Erich Schonfeld notes: A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. These efforts at creating an underlying… Continue reading Towards An Open Database of Places: Location Autodiscovery

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RESTful error handling with Tomcat and SpringMVC 3.x

Handling errors in a REST way is seemingly simple enough: upon requesting a resource, when an error occurs, a proper status code and a body that contains a parseable message and using the content-type of the request should be returned. The default error pages in Tomcat are ugly. Not only they expose too much of… Continue reading RESTful error handling with Tomcat and SpringMVC 3.x

Building a content aggregation service with node.js

Fetching, aggregating and transforming data for delivery is a seemingly complex task. Imagine a service that serves aggregated search results from Twitter, Google and Bing where the response has to be tailored for mobile and web. One has to fetch data from different sources, parse and compose the results then transform them into the right… Continue reading Building a content aggregation service with node.js

Using Spring 3.0 MVC for RESTful web services (rebuttal)

Update Mar.04 Thanks to @ewolff some of the points described below are now official feature requests. One (SPR-6928) is actually scheduled in Spring 3.1 (cool!). I’ve updated the post and added all open tickets. Please vote! This post is somewhat a response to InfoQ’s Comparison of Spring MVC and JAX-RS. Recently I have completed a… Continue reading Using Spring 3.0 MVC for RESTful web services (rebuttal)

Unit testing with Commons HttpClient library

I want to write testable code and occasionally I bump into frameworks that make it challenging to unit test. Ideally I want to inject a service stub into my code then control the stub’s behavior based on my testing needs. Commons Http Client from Jakarta facilitates integration with HTTP services but how to easily unit… Continue reading Unit testing with Commons HttpClient library

Spincloud, now with worldwide forecast

In my constant search for free weather data for Spincloud, a short while ago I have found a gem: free forecast data offered by the progressive Norwegian Meteorologic Institute. The long range forecast coverage is fairly thorough and covers most more than 2700 locations worldwide. I am happy to announce that I have extended spincloud.com… Continue reading Spincloud, now with worldwide forecast

Continuous everything?

I admit that I regard automation as a dull but vital part in the success of a project. Automation had evolved into Continuous Integration, a powerful toolset allowing frequent and regular building and testing of the code. I won’t get into what CI is (check the internets). Instead, I am going to explore a couple… Continue reading Continuous everything?