Planet XMLhack

A few days ago Amazon Upgrade was announced, which lets you access (some of) the books you bought from them -- for a reasonable fee.

Here's how the announcement looks like:

Now, if only this book could also be made accessible:

Posted at 19:06

Today was a big day at work as the code-name we operated under for a year now, The Venice Project, was put to rest for the official brand name that we will be using from now on: Joost! This does not mean that we're quite ready to let the cat entirely out of the bag about our "TV meets the Web" venture: we are still in a closed, invite-only beta program for a while. However, to celebrate on this auspicious day, I will send an invite to the first few people who drop a comment here with their first name, last name and email address. Also, now that we have reached a more public level, I will try to post about some of the cool things that we are doing with SVG and other sweet XML technologies in the client application, which is the part of the application I work on.

Sorry, no more invites for the moment.

Posted at 14:19

XSLT in the browser, its original motivating use case, has had a somewhat difficult time, but with support finally appearing in Opera and Safari, and the support in IE and Firefox/mozilla being fairly stable it looked like perhaps its time had come (even if stuck in an XSLT 1 era).

But then came Firefox 3 beta 5.....

Firefox has decided that relative links that traverse the filesystem out of the current directory are a security error. They are (pretty confusingly) reported as XML parse error rather than a security error.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427333

This is pretty fatal to browsing XML files on the filesystem, at NAG for instance, the documentation is distributed as a directory tree of a few thousand XML files, at the top level is a styles directory and so the individual files have xml-stylesheet links linking to ../../styles/foo.xsl or whatever is needed. This works in all browsers that support XSLT at all, except firefox 3 beta 5. Where apparently the only solution is to change the link to href="foo.xsl" and then copy the stylesheet into dozens of directories. Blurgh....

I hope bug 427333 gets fixed before FF3 gets out of beta....

Posted at 10:48

Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)--Ambient crowds are the new distributed computing platform. Smart mobs are fashioning new architectures for social networking. Armed with cell phones and mobile gaming devices, they are the new business model for location-based services. Seditious crowds are creating havoc in urban theaters of war and at global economic forums. Crowds of shoppers, endowed with smart chip credit cards and RFID tagged merchandise are trailed by long-lasting data shadows that follow them ubiquitously.

Posted at 05:16

O'Reilly Video Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)--Convergence is about breaking down islands of information based on traditional disciplines or professional categories or those created by the traditional organization of the architecture, engineering, construction, transportation, and utility and telecommunications industries. The convergence...

Posted at 05:16

O'Reilly Video Building on its influential predecessor chicagocrime.org, EveryBlock takes the local-data mashup to new levels. Founder and hacker Adrian Holovaty talks about the philosophy and technology behind EveryBlock, the untapped potential of address-specific news, open data, and life after...

Posted at 05:16

.vbutton {padding:5px; border:groove 3px; background-color:#c0cCFF; color:white; font-family:Verdana; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:12pt; cursor:pointer;} .vbutton:hover {background-color:#e0e0ff;border:outset;} .vbutton:active {background-color:#a0a0ff;border:inset;} O'Reilly Video Since Google first presented a snapshot of the geoweb at last year's Where 2.0, it has considerably evolved: more Geo data is...

Posted at 04:16

.vbutton {padding:5px; border:groove 3px; background-color:#c0cCFF; color:white; font-family:Verdana; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:12pt; cursor:pointer;} .vbutton:hover {background-color:#e0e0ff;border:outset;} .vbutton:active {background-color:#a0a0ff;border:inset;} O'Reilly Video James Greiner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest, Inc. In preparation for Where 2.0, MapQuest conducted an ethnography study. The massive...

Posted at 04:16

Today I took some time to quickly scan through a backlog in my feed reader. There were a good number anti-XML articles cropping up. This got me thinking. What do you think of when I say "XML"? I personally associate...

Posted at 21:16

Join us in San Francisco for an in-depth look at Mark Logic and what we can enable for you.

Posted at 17:15

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is now shipping from Amazon and other stores. I reviewed a pre-release copy of it and liked it. But the best part is–like Cory’s other books–it’s downloadable right now, for free, under an open content license. I can attest that this is an effective strategy for getting your name and your work out into the wild. If you really like it, then please purchase it in a convenient portable package, also known as a printed book. :-) -m

Posted at 16:28

Microsoft Research has launched a public beta of the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) this week, which has generated considerable buzz in the blogosphere - mainly because über-geek blogger Robert Scoble stated that it made him cry when he saw a preview earlier this year.

I just downloaded the beta version myself and it is indeed pretty. Think of Google Earth, but looking outward at the universe rather than at our planet here. You can scroll and zoom and explore and see the night sky in much more detail than most people have ever experienced in a planetarium. It has a detailed database of astronomical objects, including stars, planets, constellations, and galaxies. You can use a search function to find any celestial object, or you can use the locator pane that points out noteworthy objects in your current field of view.

And it comes with great guided tours - slides, pictures from different wavelength images, and narration - that give you expert insights into little corners of the universe you didn't know about. And it allows you to control your actual telescope to zoom in on the same object you are viewing on your computer. And it's free. So it's a nice educational tool, no doubt.

But does it make me cry?

Hardly, if you consider that it has all been done before. For the avid hobby astronomer such features have already been available for quite a while. Starry Night Software does exactly what the WWT does, i.e. it lets you explore the night sky and provides guided tours to various astronomical events, controls your telescope, and it has far more features than the WWT. The only difference is that you have to buy Starry Night on a CD/DVD and install it on your computer, whereas you use WWT like you are using Google Earth: with a thin client viewer and all the data resides on the web.

The one thing I do like about the WWT is that any tours created in the software are, of course, stored in XML format. Microsoft hasn't yet published the specifications or schema for them, but I was able to create a short tour myself and then edited it further with our XMLSpy XML Editor.

So what is so innovative about the WWT that it warrants such a buzz? All it does is apply the thin client viewer plus cloud database approach to an astronomy application. That is certainly not revolutionary - I'd say it's not even original. Why you need a research lab to do it, is beyond me. It sure is a pretty application, but it simply doesn't deserve the hype and attention.

Posted at 15:04

On application servers and generating XML with XQuery.

Posted at 13:44

The W3C Web Application Formats several new and update working drafts about Widgets: More...

Posted at 13:12

Not a political tax, the angle bracket tax.

Posted at 12:31

Being a picture of one, with some other things.

It’s a window. Some of the people and things are reflected in it, others seen through it. Honestly I don’t know which is which. If you’re from Vancouver and the propeller rings a bell, you’ve probably walked by it down on Granville Island.

Posted at 08:19

Posted at 08:05

This is a bit off-topic and might even be old news for some, but I recently stumbled across this video of a great e-mail productivity enhancing talk titled "Inbox Zero" by Merlin Mann. For further information, see his series of blog postings on the same topic on 43folders.com.

This very closely reflects my personal policy of dealing with e-mail, with the main difference being that once I'm done processing a message, I archive my e-mail into a variety of hierarchical folders instead of just one big archive folder - primarily for easier retrieval from a mobile device.

Another productivity tip for e-mail: keep your replies short and sweet. Maybe as short as five.sentenc.es? I haven't managed to adopt that one yet...

Posted at 02:53

I’m glad I went to JavaOne. I want to go again. In order of increasing importance: The Java language is looking stale. The Java platform is looking interesting. And the Java community, well, it’s something special.

The Community

Damn, it’s big: millions and millions. Let’s assume it’s the better-and-brighter who come out to JavaOne. And I’m impressed. These are people who aren’t religious and aren’t close-minded and just want to Get Shit Done. Oh, and they’ve already got a lot of it done and they aren’t interested in discarding that investment.

Any technology that’s plausibly going to help these people get their jobs done better, with any combination of less time, better quality, and less pain, given that it works with what they’ve got, is going to get a fair hearing. And did I mention it’s big? The party line claims over six million developers, and even allowing for marketing over-reach leaves you with a big number.

Any technology that wants to hit the big-time that isn’t making a pitch for these people is being unclear on the concept.

The Platform

Lord knows I’ve gone on enough about the difference between the Java language and the platform. But the platform, hey, it’s really pretty slick. After I wrote up the RESTful SOA preso from Overstock.com, I ran into Sean Landis and Ian Robertson walking around the trade-show floor. They were telling me about the latency they were seeing, end-to-end in and out of their RESTlet-based Java stack, and couldn’t remember off the top of their heads whether it was 20 or 40 ms. I know some people working on complicated Rails deployments, and let’s just say the latencies are, well, different.

And you know, the platform’s not standing still; check out John Rose’s superb The Golden Spike. Dissing the JVM engineers would be a symptom of stupidity, and these guys are biting into JVM-for-everything issues with a vengeance; they are fortunate to have the JRuby gang serving them up a big, fat, juicy, co-operative test-case.

The Language

I’ve written a ton of Java over the years. I can still remember how much I enjoyed learning it (not till ’96 in my case, writing the world’s first XML parser), how you could fit it all in your head and how well the pieces fit together and how things Just Worked.

Nowadays, I have to say, I really have trouble with Java-the-language. I hated generics when they arrived and while I’ve tried to be fair, I just haven’t been able to unclench.

But mostly, there’s just Too Much Code. The job can be done with less, and increasingly I think it should be. And I read things like Refactoring from Ceremony to Essence and I know I’m not alone.

The Future

If you want to read some really smart words on this subject, and you have a half-hour to spare, hop on over to Steve Yegge’s Dynamic Languages Strike Back. What Steve said.

As far as languages go, higher-level is the future. As far as platforms go, I wouldn’t want to bet against Java.

Posted at 00:46

Posted at 00:32

Is it really that taxing... - O'Reilly XML Blog Most of the time when I find a programmer struggling with XML, they are a relational database programmer or an object-oriented programmer, or both. We should have lined these guys up...

Posted at 00:16

I only managed to take in a few talks here and there, but the ones I did catch sure had some first-rate REST preaching. To the extent that there’s a surprising trend at this year’s J1, I’d say it’s REST-is-in, “Big Web Services” (see below) are out.

Project Zero: Groovy + PHP + Java + REST

I went and caught Rob Nicholson’s The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java Technology—the Best of Both Worlds. He’s one of the IBM “Project Zero” guys. I’ve been unimpressed by the project’s “We can’t be open-source because we’re commercial” positioning, but it was an interesting talk.

Rob Nicholson.

This part of Zero is called “Project sMash”. You can write logic in Java or Groovy or PHP—their own PHP-on-the-JVM implementation. I couldn’t quite figure out where you’d use Groovy and where PHP, and I was puzzled that, unlike other modern Web frameworks, this thing doesn’t seem to come with a built-in unit-testing framework.

At runtime, each application crams all this PHP and Groovy and Java and Web serving and so on into a single JVM, started via a Portlet. Also, It’s got a multi-level shared scratch data space called “Global Content” that reminded me of Apache memory-management pools. Which was, I thought, the most technically interesting part of the puzzle.

There’s a built-into-the-browser IDE because that’s supposed to reduce time-to-market, but there’s also an Eclipse plug-in, which is what Project Zero developers actually use.

The big deal though, was the focus on RESTful Web Services. You can annotate your PHP code somewhat like the JSR-311 people are doing with Java to get the resources and URIs and code connections set up.

It’s even got a REST-to-SOAP gateway so that you can call out to things like SugarCRM that are SOAPy.

JSR 311

I went to a presentation by Paul Sandoz and Marc Hadley about the work they’re doing on JSR311 and the Jersey implementation. I’ve been friendly to this project for a while; it looks like a nice clean way to help Java developers do REST properly.

The demo was nice and slick; I predict a bright future for this thing.

SOA @ Overstock

But the most interesting Web-Service-y preso was It’s All About the SOA: RESTful Service-Oriented Architecture at Overstock.com by Sean Landis and Ian Robertson; Overstock.com is a very high-volume online merchant. They weren’t talking theory, they were talking about how they’d actually converted their V1 C implementation to a modern Java version, all running along REST lines.

This and several other presentations opened with a basic introduction to REST concepts; my suspicion is that, given all these well-attended sessions, never before have so many developers received the core REST pitch in such a short time. Several people plugged Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby’s RESTful Web Services as The Place To Start, but the JavaOne bookstore didn’t have it.

This presentation included this slide discussing their decision to go with REST rather than WS-*, which they called “Big Web Services”; I kind of like that name. I think it speaks for itself, but there was one nice sound-bite about REST that I’d like to pass on: “Full control without much complexity.”

The Overstock system was based on the Restlet API, which, when I looked at it last (quite a while ago) I’d found kind of heavyweight and complicated, but I gather it’s evolved. The code samples looked clean and straightforward, and I was particularly impressed by how they did load sharing by dispatching step-by-step along the URI path to different machines.

Their lessons-learned slide was really excellent, but I didn’t capture it and can’t find it online. The take-away that’s obvious once you think of it is that since you can’t possibly deploy all the components of a distributed system instantly in parallel, version N of each protocol has to interoperate with version N-1; that way you can roll things out without breaking things.

They didn’t claim that REST made building this kind of system easy; just that it was the best alternative for them. And I enjoyed their attempt to snatch the “SOA” acronym out of the WS-* swamp.

Conclusions

Down in the big Java One trade-show, there was a “SOA village”, where all the vendors of SOAP/WSDL/WS-* technology were talking about Governance and Reliability and Integration and so on. “Village” is the word all right; a village left behind by history. It was kind of sad, actually. REST may not have won, but SOA-as-in-WSDL is in the middle of losing.

My second take-away, watching the presentations’ sample code: there was way too much of it. When you’ve been living in Ruby-land for a while, Java’s verbosity starts to hurt your eyes. In particular those constructors spilling across two or three lines, festooned with hideously-nested generics cruft; that’s just wrong.

Having said that, I’m really glad that Java is getting all this REST machinery, and that the community is developing some best practices, because it will make Java a much better citizen in an increasingly-RESTful world.

Posted at 23:41

Almost exactly four years ago we launched blogs.sun.com. It’s been a trip, almost all upside, remarkably problem free. There’s a bit of new news, both inbound and outbound.

Our blogging policy arrived on the scene in parallel with the blogs. For the first time since then, it’s been updated: see Linda Sckrocki’s Sun’s Revised Blogging Policy (AKA Guidelines on Public Discourse). Linda is the point-person for keeping the whole thing running; both servers and policies.

Doing the revision was a little tedious and there were actually a couple of points of internal disagreement. It’s really tough to produce something that’s short and human-readable enough to be useful as a problem preventer, while at the same time meeting legal professionals’ (entirely legitimate) concerns for i-dotting and t-crossing.

Now, here’s something that I think is actually more interesting and new. Meet Joanne Kisling:

She’s in our PR group, and leads our work on Blogger Relations. I don’t know, she may well be the world’s first blogger-oriented PR professional.

One of her recent projects was retaining Marshall Kirkpatrick to build the JavaOne Blog Central 2008; Marshall wrote it up in How to Build an RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project.

Are you a blogger? Want some help talking with Sun? Remember Joanne, and first.last@sun.com.

Posted at 22:42

Jeff Atwood mentions the Angle Bracket Tax and not surprisingly, I don't agree. XML can be difficult and painful at times, but I think the reasons are not entirely technical. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with XML in...

Posted at 21:47

Brain.Save() - We are pleased to bring you new features in .NET 3.5 SP1 Syndication OM for the Atom Publishing Protocol. We added strongly-typed OM for all of the constructs defined in the Atom Publishing Protocol specification (like ServiceDocument and...

Posted at 21:47

So as Jeff Barr recently pointed out over on the Amazon Web Services blog, Amazon Web Services Blog: Redundant Disk Storage Across Multiple EC2 XML Hacker M. David Peterson has put together a really interesting article. As part of his...

Posted at 20:47

Jeff Atwood mentions the Angle Bracket Tax and not surprisingly, I don't agree. I enjoy XML, but it is still frustrating at times. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with XML in Java and it was not pretty. Even...

Posted at 19:17

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has updated two working drafts on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: More...

Posted at 15:09

I've just caught up with this document from W3C which fills in a big gap in English-language technical material. Japanese typesetting technology has been very influential in the other Ideographic countries, and they share many commonalities (e.g. Japanese ruby text...

Posted at 14:16

I've just caught up with this document from W3C which fills in a big gap in English-language technical material. Japanese typesetting technology has been very influential in the other Ideographic countries, and they share many commonalities (e.g. Japanese ruby text...

Posted at 14:16