Practical RDF

Chapter 11. A Brief Look at Additional RDF Application Environments

The previous chapters have provided a reasonably detailed look at several APIs created in some of the more popular programming languages today: Java, PHP, Python, and Perl. However, as popular as these languages are, they’re not the only ones implementing APIs for processing RDF/XML. There are APIs created in LISP and C, Ruby, Tcl, even .NET-enabled APIs written in C#.

Additionally, some APIs are released as part of a larger framework—APIs connected with a repository or other higher-level functionality. Technically, these frameworks do provide language-based APIs. However, their size and complexity tend to make them a bit much for those looking only for a set of objects to create and/or read an RDF/XML document.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look—briefly, because we want to get into some uses of RDF—at some of the odd-language APIs as well as the more complex frameworks. To start, we’ll look at APIs written in that new kid on the block: C#.

RDF and C#

When Microsoft went to its new .NET architecture, one of the products released with the architecture was the Common Language Runtime (CLR), a programming language platform capable of supporting different programming languages. The first language released was C#, a hybrid between C++ and Java.

Tip

If you’re running Linux, you don’t need .NET to compile C# code; you can also compile the code using the C# compiler provided with Mono, an open source CLR alternative. Download ...