It’s not a blog, It’s a feature

I have been working with Activiti lately and needed to test the REST API included with the demo. Below are the GET and POST requests I whipped up using Groovy. Hope you find this is useful

//---Get Request
@Grab(group='org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder', module='http-builder', version='0.5.0' )
import groovyx.net.http.RESTClient

def client = new RESTClient('http://localhost:8080/activiti-rest/service/process-engine')
println client.get(headers:[Authorization:"Basic ${'kermit:kermit'.bytes.encodeBase64()}"]).data

// output
[name:default, exception:null, version:5.7, resourceUrl:jar:file:/Users/juanvazquez/Documents/activiti-5.7/apps/apache-tomcat-6.0.32/webapps/activiti-rest/WEB-INF/lib/activiti-cfg.jar!/activiti.cfg.xml]

// POST request
@Grab(group='org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder', module='http-builder', version='0.5.0' )
import static groovyx.net.http.ContentType.JSON

def jsonObj = new groovy.json.JsonBuilder()
jsonObj{
  userId 'kermit'
  password 'kermit'
}
def client = new groovyx.net.http.RESTClient('http://localhost:8080/activiti-rest/service/login')
def response = client.post(contentType: JSON, body:jsonObj.toString() )

println response.data           

//output
[success:true]

A long time ago I wanted to write a desktop GUI interface for Flickr. At the time I had just learned Java and thought it would be really cool to write it using swing. Little did I know how not cool working with swing would be

About halfway through the project I heard about a cool new dynamic way to write Java code called Groovy. From that day on Groovy has been making my life a whole lot easier. I didn’t need all the functionality in the flickrj library, so I decide to write a few methods for my app using Groovy. The hardest part of the whole thing was figuring out how to post images to Flickr, for that, I used the flickrj code as a reference. If that source code was not available, I don’t think I would have ever figured it out. So a big thanks to all the folks working on that project!

This is not a complete API for Flickr, but should provide enough to get started.
Link to my GitHub Repo

So for my own geeky pleasure, I decided to try writing cgi scripts with Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl.  All had readily accessible documentation on how to POST to a https URL but ruby. My first thought was to look at the Net:HTTP documentation found HERE.

The one example I wanted was not listed. I did some searching around and pieced together the following code. I hope this is as big a help to you as it was to me. Looking at it, It seems pretty intuitive….but if your like me, sometimes you need it spelled out

As a side note, setting path to path = ‘/../’ is my work-around for a script that is mapped to www.mysite.com rather than ‘/some_POST_handling_script.rb’


#Juan Vazquez ->javazquez.com
require 'net/http'
require 'net/https'
http = Net::HTTP.new('www.mysite.com', 443)
http.use_ssl = true
#path(a.k.a) ->www.mysite.com/some_POST_handling_script.rb'
path = '/some_POST_handling_script.rb'
data = 'badguy=Gargamel'