8 mavenize and refactoring

[kennycason]

@karma0 @AlchemyAPI

Howdy guys! We just signed on to use you guy's API through an IBM partnership. I noticed the Java SDK hadn't been touched in a while so I made some updates. If you guys are ok with the direction I'm taking the SDK I will/can continually make updates based off of our use-cases.

They will include:

• Updated ReadMe (after approval of this PR)
• Continued maintenance
• Dedicated response object (instead of just raw responses)
• Extended Json support
• Improved error handling
• Multiple Java versions support
• Release of new versions to Maven Central
• Adding asserts into the STests (there were none in the original tests)
• Further modularization of AlchemyApi class instead of one giant class.

The current branch that I would like to merge does the following:

• Mavenize the project
• Use a view 3rd party libraries to aide in common tasks/response consumption
• Rewrote all the tests as STests as they are not actual unit tests
• Refactored tests into logical methods
• Refactored all method/variable/class names per Java standards
• Removed the many unnecessary checked exceptions that stemmed from response parsing in favor of unchecked, implementation agnostic exceptions.
• Implemented logger over System.out.println
• Created a standard SDK Configuration object instead of various static sdk constructors.
• Upgraded to Java 7

Let me know what you think!

[kennycason]

ping

[mike-houghton]

@kennycason Is this project active? Are you using your branch?

[kennycason]

@mike-houghton I don't know. I'm assuming that since Alchemy team hasn't responded that they are likely not improving the product. As such, we switched services.

[kennycason]

I like their API endpoints which all seem to work fine. If you want to use the java sdk feel free to use my fork (https://github.com/kennycason/alchemyapi_java) I can quickly accept PRs and make improvements as well. I can also work to get it in maven central.

[karma0]

You may want to reach out to Alchemy's sales or marketing teams, they should be able to get the right people on the job. There's been a lot of changes over there since they were acquired by the IBM Watson team, so it's possible that the repos may have fallen off their radars.

[kennycason]

Already did that and received a response from them that they would alert their devs. :)

[cbmcvey]

Hi Kenny, I'm also interested in improving this API, mavenizing, etc. Any word? I'll pull down your fork and begin working with it.

[kennycason]

@cbmcvey No response on my end. Feel free to just work off mine. If alchemy won't maintain it, I don't mind doing so.

[kennycason]

@Freheims I also merged all to master on my fork. Feel free to just create PRs on my repo (or your downstream fork) and i'll merge them in. I have a feeling that Alchemy is going to force us to maintain the SDK ourselves externally :)

[kennycason]

To anyone else, project is here: https://github.com/kennycason/alchemyapi_java

I just opened up "issues" so we can track work.