I have recently gotten quite a bit of feedback from people using the PBJ library to consume and work with the PBCS REST API. This has resulted in a few fixes and improvements. First of all, file uploads and downloads are now working. The code has been in for awhile but wasn’t merged to the master branch.

Second, I have been working with the very talented Francisco Amores to help integrate the PBJ library with FDMEE so that it can be used there in various integration scenarios. So this is a really cool usage of PBJ where the library is being dropped in to FDMEE/ODI and utilized with a very simple Jython script.

To help with this scenario, I added a new compile option to PBJ that allows it to be packaged up into a single “uber JAR” – meaning a Java JAR file that contains all of its dependencies rolled into a single library. This makes it a little easier to integrate and drop-in to other systems, instead of having to worry out additional JAR files.

We had to make a couple of other tweaks to the way the library is packaged in order to make it specifically work in FDMEE/ODI, due to a conflicting underlying library. This is kind of a classic Java class loader problem, because what happens is that the two different versions of the class are both available to be loaded, and the older version of the class gets loaded but that class doesn’t have a required method, so a “no such method found” exception is thrown. But by renaming the package/method when it’s compiled, we can get around it and make it really simple. The PBJ GitHub page has some more info on how to compile this.

I think in the near future Fransisco will be blogging out this really interesting integration scenario, so stay tuned!