Controlled Thinking Blog

I was looking around java.net – somewhere I haven’t been for a while – and noticed an article discussing a few new Java tools.  I cloned the project and poked around a bit.  I found reference to the Retrofit project and did a deeper dive.  It looks like it’s most popular on the Android, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used in a regular ol’ Java SE-type of application.  Basically, Retrofit supplies an abstraction for accessing RESTful web services.

To put it to the test, I found a public API called “Brewery DB” and used an online tool to churn out some POJOs based on the sample JSON for the web service.  Unfortunately, it looks like the RESTful service I chose has died on the vine.  In any case, I was able to query the API for its list of beers and get populated Java objects out of it.  I hope to revisit Retrofit again in the near future.

So apparently the Add-On SDK for Firefox extension development is being put to rest.  WebExtensions are where it’s at.  This is probably old news to many, but I’ve not been paying close attention.  The new method is modeled after Chrome’s extension stuff and supposedly even Edge has a similar method.

Anyway, I spent Thursday and Friday of this week working on a little Firefox WebExtension.  I’ve added a toolbar button with a popup dialog and some code to communicate with a background script.  The next step is to use the “storage” part of the API.

I quit my job in June of this year to spend the summer with my kids.  I also wanted to spend some time messing around with some different software – tools, languages, etc.  I especially wanted to play around with some of the new Java 8 features.  As you can see, I’ve also taken the opportunity to install WordPress.  We’ll see how this goes!