Linked Data Microframework: Linked Ratpack

The other day I ran across some of the Sinatra inspired web microframeworks available in various languages, including Ratpack for Groovy.  Given RDF builder DSL in Groovy Sparql, I thought it would be a nice thought expertiment to create a microframework for linked data and RDF.  After an afternoon of coding and testing, the results look quite promising.  So here it is - Linked Ratpack, a microframework for Linked Data.

Linked RP works the same way Ratpack does - you provide a single Domain Specific Language (DSL) script where you write your methods to perform some function on a URL, and it weaves those in to a Jetty container.  In this case, I've added some capabilities to Ratpack to work with linked data:

• RDFBuilder from Groovy SPARQL is automatically available to the DSL script under the 'rdf' variable
• link(String endpoint) is available as a function to get an instance of the Groovy SPARQL Sparql class for performing Sparql queries.
• resolve(String uri) is a new piece of functionality that uses Groovy's HTTPBuilder DSL and Jena to retrieve a URL and read it into RDF.  It should work across various RDF serialization types, and likely bomb out on HTML or anything else if you feed it an incorrect URI

The following Gist illustrates everything fairly nicely:



You can now browse to the following URLs:

• localhost:4999/
• localhost:4999/tim
• localhost:4999/groovy

Note: since Jena models being returned by those functions get automatically serialized back out - if you want to do serialization inline - return null

To get started with Linked Ratpack, you must do the following:

1. Get Groovy SPARQL from Github, and build/install it with Gradle
2. Get Linked Ratpack from Github, and build it
3. Create simple groovy scripts, like the above gist, and run "ratpack path/to/whatever.groovy"

This will start an HTTP server on whatever port you define in the DSL.  After that, you can start browsing to your URLs, hooking up SPARQL endpoint and generating RDF.

For me, this is one of the missing pieces in building linked data applications - an easy way to stand up little RDF servers to test walking RDF graphs hop-by-hop and perform URI de-referencing, and experimenting with generating derivative RDF sites from other RDF data sources (e.g. SPARQL Construct).

Many thanks to Justin Voss ( @ github ) for creating Ratpack in the first place, it was a solid foundation to build off of.

Enjoy!