Java and the ServiceAPI

Intro

On a sunny Friday afternoon my mind turns away from deadlines and release dates and toward pet projects.  My impression has been that we do not have many Java developers in the Records Manager world, at least I don't hear from them.  Maybe that is just because they have given up long ago.  Given the seeming lack of interest we have never put a lot of time into supporting Java developers, the question for me became, how can we do something that is more than nothing without the 'gung ho' of an official toolkit?

Open Source

As of last night our unofficial Codeplex site contains a Java toolkit for consuming the ServiceAPI.  It is not complete missing some non-core bits (such as the ability to fetch messages, object and property definitions etc).  It is also very much a part time project by a part time Java programmer (me).  If you happen to be an expert Java programmer please make some suggestions (or create a pull request), it would be great to make this thing better.

The future

The amount of time I put into this will correlate pretty directly to the interest I get, if no one asks questions (or complains) not much will happen.  

Written on October 9, 2015