Last Tuesday as I was writing the Agent Writing Guide it really came home to me how difficult it was to write a plug-in for Genesis.  I mean, I know it wasn’t cake, but just take a gander at this code snippet for adding a person to the data store:

// Create the graph in which to store the data
IResourceNode graph;
try {
  graph = view.getResource("urn:source1#default");
  graph.addObject(view.getResource(GP.SOURCE), site, graph);
} catch (Exception e) {
  // Handle exception
}    

// Create the person
try {
  IResourceNode person = view.getResource("urn:person1");
  person.addObject(view.getResource(RDF.TYPE), view.getResource(GC.INDIVIDUAL), graph);    

  // Set the name
  person.addObject(view.getResource(GC.NAME), view.getLiteral("Geertruida Dirks /Adama/"), graph);    

  // Set the gender
  person.addObject(view.getResource(GC.GENDER), view.getLiteral("F"), graph);
} catch (Exception e) {
  // Handle exception
}

For an RDF buff this is of course fine, but knowledge of RDF shouldn’t be a prerequisite at all.

Something had to be done, so today I wrote a genealogy abstraction layer.  The above code can now be accomplished with:

// Create the source of this data
Source source = new Source("urn:source1", null);   

// Create the person
Individual person = new Individual("urn:person1", source);    

// Set the name
person.addName("Geertruida Dirks /Adama/", source);    

// Set the gender
person.addGender(Individual.FEMALE, source);

That’s better.

Filed in Genesis
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