Robusta

I was just posting this into Google+ when I realized I was typing more than I'd intended. It read more like a short blog post. Which reminded me.... "Oh yeah. I have a blog out there somewhere! Maybe I should write this in there."

After spending a lot of recent nights on JavaScript I think I'm starting to get a feel for it. I started with Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts", and am now plowing through David Flanagan's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide". (I met David when he came to Brisbane to run a short course on Java programming back in 1996. Nice guy. He said that he'd preferred to have called his book "Java in a Demitasse", but O'Reilly wanted it in their "Nutshell" series).

After using languages like Ruby, Erlang, Scala and Clojure, I'm finding it a little frustrating, but it's hard to argue with the ubiquity of the platform. Fortunately it has closures and first class functions, though the variable scoping is bizarre. I've been enjoying the callback approach to asynchronous function calls, though the syntax tends to make the resulting code confusing to read. I'm mostly sticking to Crockford's subset of the language, and this does make things a little more sensible. Flanagan's book has been filling in the gaps for me, but it's especially useful for documenting libraries like HTML5 Canvas and the File API.

As with all first attempts at using a language, mine is a little messy and inconsistent. However, it can't hurt to put it out there. I've built a simple tool for working with SPARQL endpoints (specifically aimed at Jena/Fuseki, but it should mostly work on others too). The important piece is the SPARQL connection object that it comes with (found in sparql.js). I'm hoping that this will be a useful object for more general application. It can even convert XML responses into a SPARQL-JSON structure (I wrote this after discovering Fuseki was ignoring my Content-type settings on queries).

Unfortunately, it's missing one important piece, which is the ability to upload a file from a browser. In general, it's possible to upload a file using a form submission, but that encodes all the parameters into the request body, and the SPARQL HTTP protocol requires that the graph URI appear as a parameter in the URL of the request. In an attempt to get the graph parameter out of the body and into the URL, I even tried dynamically constructing the URL for the form submission, but the browser "cleverly" saw what I was doing and pushed the parameter back into the body. So I can't use form submission. Alternatively, JavaScript makes it easy to submit an HTTP POST operation with everything set the way you want it. However, the only way to read a local file is through the form submission process, which means I still can't do a file upload. In the end, I just used Fuseki's file upload servlet, but this has the problem of being non-standard, and it also doesn't like URIs that aren't http (yes Andy, that's why I asked you about this restriction - though I'd already run into it at work).

The resulting system needed a name, so I called it Robusta. Everyone seems to be enamored with Arabica beans, but no one ever talks about Robusta beans. Don't get me wrong.... if I had to choose between the two I'd definitely go for the Arabica. But by blending in a small portion of Robusta beans you add a richness to the flavor of your coffee (it's also used as a cheap "filler" and promotes crema in espresso, but I like the flavor aspect). At the time, I came up with the name because I really needed some caffeine, and Arabica was too obvious. But in retrospect, I like the name, since adding a bit of SPARQL to your scripts can really enhance a system (OK, that's tacky. I probably need another one of those coffees). It wasn't after I'd had some coffee that I thought to look for other projects with the same name, but by that point it was already up there.

Robusta is still a work in progress, and it's mostly a late night project that fits around everything else that I'm doing. But I'm using it at work, and it makes my life easier. I'd like to know if anyone has ideas for it, or can point out errors, inefficiencies, or potential improvements. It's posted at GitHub as a part of the Revelytix project group, at:
  http://github.com/revelytix/robusta