Programming fun at startup

There are various ways to generate REST api documentation but how can you do it with minimal effort. Unless you are looking into very sophisticated documentation like twitter https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api, the below should suffice. If you though however want to generate twitter like documentation then also 70% of what I highlighted would work. Jersey by default supports WADL generation by default. WADL is machine readable rest api description simliar to what WDSL was to soap. In order to get to default wadl generated by jersey you can just call http://localhost:8080/application.wadl . This WADL is a XML document so all you need now is to render it with a stylesheet. WADL has documentation tags that can be used to document a resource byt unfortunately jersey by default doesnt generate documentation tags. So to get real html documentation the steps are: 1) Document you rest services using Java docs for the resource class and resource method. The down side of using java docs i...

I had this requirement of generating PDF out of HTML content. Users can add any kind of html content on a Rich text editor from few lines to a full paragraph as notes for a file and save it on the server. Now I had to notify other users when some user adds a note. Now in the past I have generated PDF for reports but that was on a structured data straight out of database so I could easily use something like itext or jasperreports but  this one seems an interesting problem as user can do any free form html in the editor. Ultimately the solution came to be: Convert the html added by user into xhtml using JTidy  Use flying saucer's ITextRenderer ( http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/ ) to generate the pdf out of xhtml. Here is a sample code public class TextSectionConverter { private String notesContent; public TextSectionConverter(String notesContent) { this.notesContent = notesContent; } public void writeAsPdf(FileOutputStream fos) throws Exception { ...