Open Planets Foundation

Somewhat later than planned, I present here my final installment on the Format Registry Challenge.

During this “experiment” I have spent some time becoming acquainted with the Git version control system, working with both Windows msysgit and the Eclipse Git plugin EGit. One result is that my prototype registry source code (and associated war archive) is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/rcking/formatregistry

Before I started with format editing, I realized that it would be very simple to implement cool URLs for file formats. The only difficulty was that Tapestry associates pages with Java classes, and “x-fmt” is not an allowed Java class name. This meant implementing URL re-directs, which is a special topic in Tapestry. Tapestry does not believe in heavily modifying the web.xml, almost all configuration takes part in so-called filter classes. Anyway, once I sorted out how to do re-writes, I could immediately produce nice output for requests like:

http://host/repository/x-fmt/123

Last week I was at home in bed for four days with a bad back. I could not really type, but I could browse, so I did have an opportunity to catch up on the recent OPF blog entries. I was particularly interested in the discussions regarding a new Format Registry. I am an amateur Java programmer at best, but I enjoy getting my hands dirty now and again, so I decided to take up Adam’s challenge: how far could I get with a format registry application in one week? This blog entry is a report on my first two days of the project.