FOAFverse Coming Along

The latest on the FOAFverse:

I've refactored the downloading of the FOAF file to use HttpClient from Jakarta Commons. This gives me much more exact control over the HTTP connections (setting Accept header correctly, setting User-Agent for LiveJournal doesn't get pissed) and I can easily add caching (thanks EHCache).

I've created a HttpClientTemplate to get all the boiler plate code out, like handling exceptions and setting common headers.

My queue is in place to fetch new FOAF files as I discover them. Which leads me to my next favorite refactoring: abstracting out the Strategies for finding the Friends of a Person. There are many ways to link to the FOAF file of a Friend. A common way is rdfs:seeAlso. Others might use the foaf:PersonalProfileDocument or its inverse foaf:hasPersonalProfileDocument. Each method of finding the FOAF file of a friend is a Strategy. As we run each one against a FOAF file, we find Friends' FOAF files, and put them in the queue to be downloaded and searched.

We're getting there. Luckily this is all code that is separate from the webapp I created the other day. It just displays the FOAF in human readable ways.

Popular posts from this blog

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet > The following is a "healthy food hot list" consisting of the 29 food that will give you the biggest nutritional bang for you caloric buck, as well as decrease your risk for deadly illnesses like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Read more

Lists and arrays in Dart

(This is Part 3 in a series about Dart. Check out Part 2, Function in Dart .) Warning : We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22. Intro Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box. The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E> , Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects. Aside: The Dart project is lucky...
Read more

Converting Array to List in Scala

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d...
Read more