Resthub

Empower Java REST web services and JavaScript Rich Clients

Rise of REST services and Rich clients

At Worldline Lyon, 2010 was the year of large architectures powered by REST Web Services. We were leaving an area dominated by monolithic SOAP back-end, and starting to look up at scalable stateless services.

With a bunch of colleages we believed in the value of Spring Framework, and in its capability to sustain multiple teams of numerous java developers. We also quickly felt the need to bring Object Oriented patterns into JavaScript Web application (also named Rich clients).

Resthub was born, including a backend Spring stack to create REST stateless APIs, and a JavaScript framework upon JQuery inspired by Sammy.js and JavaScriptMVC.

The initial team included Sebastien Deleuze and Brian Clozel (now both part of the Spring Core Team) Baptiste Meurant, Loïc Fréring, Julien Vilani and I.

First talk at Lyon Java User Group (May 20, 2010)

Technologies used

I contribute a little to the Java part, that was using Tomcat, Spring and Spring Security, Jersey and Jackson (serialization), Hibernate and Hibernate Search.

But my major contribution was on the JavaScript part, that was providing :

Spring 2012, it becames clear that using an in-house JavaScript framework was not the best choice. Only relying on our shoulder, it could not compete with flagships like Dojo, Backbone, Meteor…

So we trash it, and start using an opiniated Backbone + RequireJS + Handlebars combination.

On the Java part, it evolved to use Spring Data and even AMQP/Hessian RPC. But I had stopped writing Java since several months…

In-house… until the end

Resthub was intensively used at Worldline, for middle to large size projects, including the French National Geographic Portal (IGN portal) and Orange Telco Mobile applications shop. He’s still used in production, and until late 2014, actively developed.

But despite our efforts, (Blog posts, Meetups at Lyon and Grenoble, and even Devoxx 2010 and TakeOff 2013 conferences), it never became popular enough to be used outside Worldline.

We’re still glad to see that is was an ancestor of Spring Boot and Java Hipster .