MindTouch Dream is a .Net library for REST-oriented programming. It ships with a REST micro-server for Windows and Linux (thanks to Mono) that can be embedded into applications or used as a standalone .Net REST web-server. Dream is open source, written in C#, and licensed under LGPL. You can download Dream “Emerald” 1.5.0 from SourceForge.net.

Dream “Emerald” is the follow-up version to “Denim” which shipped last September. Since then, we’ve done many improvements to this versatile library and server. The mission of Dream is to make REST-oriented programming as simple as possible without introducing abstractions that obfuscate the versatility of HTTP. Dream includes classes such as Plug and XUri that make the WebRequest and Uri/UriBuilder classes obsolete. They promote better programming practices and require less lines of code. Similarly, the XDoc class is a generalization of XmlDocument, XmlNode, and XmlNodeList that streamlines direct operations on XML documents, alleviating the need for generated wrapper classes.

Dream also provides a concurrency and asynchronous execution library that enables efficient programming. Most of the complexity is encapsulated through the versatile Result class, which acts as synchronization point for future results.

Dream includes a REST micro-server that can act as a standalone host or embedded into applications to provide a REST API.

Improvements in Dream “Emerald” include:

• performance tuning
• memory footprint tuning
• simpler instantiation of the host service
• XDoc diffing and 3-way merge
• catch handlers for asynchronous operations
• eliminated all uses of NameValueCollection (it’s slow, a memory hog, and buggy)
• support for independent culture per request for multi-lingual services
• much improved support for instantiating objects from a database catalog
• and many more…

Dream is robust and well tested as it lies at the heart of Deki Wiki, the most popular vendor-backed wiki platform.

Let us know about your Dream projects on our our forums!