We are pleased to announce the second major release of RESThub!

RESThub 2.0 stack is based on Spring and Backbone.js, and is designed to build HTML5 applications easily and efficiently. RESThub focuses on modular web applications, made of stateless REST web services and client-side state managed by MVVM JavaScript clients.

Spring stack

RESThub Spring stack 2.0 is based on: - Java 7 by default, but Java 6 is fine too - Tomcat 7 - Spring 3.1 including Profile and JavaConfig support - Spring MVC 3.1 and Jackson 2 for REST webservices (including full handling of Object Graphs with cyclic references) - SQL and NoSQL persistence with Spring Data - Logging with SLF4J and Logback - Maven 3.0 is the reference build tool used - TestNG, FEST Fluent Assertions 2 and Mockito for testing

It provides the following features: - Guidelines for your project and configuration layout - Project templates for Spring + Backbone.js web applications (simple or multi-module) - Zero config support for JPA (with automatic JPA Entity scanning) or MongoDB databases - Generic CRUD webservices (XML and JSON by default) with builtin Exception to HTTP response mapper - Helpers for running web tests - Easy to use HTTP client based on AsyncHttplient with OAuth 2.0 support - Logging bridge allow to send Javascript logs to the server - High performance and easy to monitore RPC mechanism based on RabbitMQ and Hessian - Spring MVC router allow to use routes à la Ruby On Rails/Play Framework

Backbone Spring stack 2.0 artifacts are available on Maven Central.

Backbone.js stack

RESThub Backbone.js stack 2.0 is based on: - Backbone.js 0.9.2 + carefully selected extensions - Powerful Pageable/Sortable datagrig with Backbone Datagrid (made by Loïc Frering, a RESThub developer) - Get and set relations (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one) for Backbone models with Backbone relational - Form validation with Backbone Validation - Parameters support on view routing with Backbone Query Parameters - Require.js 2.0 for script loading including JS/CSS optimizer - Handlebars 1.0 for templating - jQuery 1.7 - Twitter Bootstrap 2.1 - Asynchronous calls with Async - Dispatching keyboard shortcuts with Keymaster - Parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates and times with Moment

If provides the following features: - Guidelines for your project layout - Project templates for easy project bootstrapping - Resthub.View extends Backbone.View to provide the following enhancements: - Default rendering implementation based on Handlebars - $root attribute used to specify the container root element where the view should be attached (since $el is the view itself) - Default template attribute with context management - Zombie view and event handler cleanup - A new populateModel function that automatically populate a model objet from form values (mapped on element names) - A client to server Javascript logger, a simple but lifesaver feature when your application run in production - Additional Handlebars helpers - A Require.js/Handlebars plugin - A simple Publish/Subscribe mechanism

Try it now!

You can try now the example “Todo application” live and take a look at the code.

Reference documentation is available for both Spring and Backbone stacks.

Feel free to contact us on RESThub discussion group if you need help or want to send us some feedbacks.

The rationale behind RESThub 2.0

RESThub is all about integrating and bundling frameworks with tools, best practices and documentation. The RESThub team works everyday with those frameworks on high traffic, enterprise-grade applications for their customers.

That’s why we value developer experience on those libraries and despise the “Not Invented Here” syndrome above all.

RESThub is a two-part web framework: you can use the JavaScript stack part with a Ruby-on-Rails or Node.js backend; or you could use the Java stack with an Angular.js frontend!

We strongly believe in Open Source Software, so the whole thing is available under the Apache License 2.0 on Maven Central and Github.

Roadmap

Expected new features for upcoming RESThub 2.1 are : - Uprade to Spring 3.2 - Upgrade to Backbone.js 1.0 - Bean Validation + Backbone Validation plugin : do not duplicate your validation anymore on client side - RESThub Identity manager : User/Group/Role webapp with Backbone.js GUI (alpha version available here) - ElasticSearch integration - Websocket support - Improved Exception to HTTP response mapper (JSON/XML serialization of i18n aware messages) - More examples applications

Contributions and feedbacks are welcomed !!!