Well, I've been doing a bunch of Atom content for developerWorks, so they asked me if I would host an Atom and RSS forum to help answer any questions people have, and I'm happy to do that. My XQuery/XPath 2.0 forum has been going pretty well, so they thought they'd have me do another one. Tyler's been in charge of a form to get XForms help, but it's been a little quiet. (Which is too bad, because if people have questions, they'll have his full attention. :)) Apparently, they've also been featuring my XForms Sudoku series on the home page for several weeks, which is unusual. I'm pretty excited about that. They're probably pushing it because of the podcast.
I've done a ton of interviews, but always as the interviewer. Yesterday I got a call asking me to be the interviewee for the IBM developerWorks podcast. They're featuring one of my articles, Use XForms to create your own Sudoku game on the developerWorks homepage this week.
I think I was almost more interested in seeing the interview from this perspective than actually doing the interview. Scott Laningham is really a great interviewer; he's great at putting people at ease, and I learned a heck of a lot from the experience.
And I've never been compared to Buckaroo Banzai before, which was funny. But is it pathetic that I wound up actually referencing my own blog?
I'm very fortunate that a lot of the pieces I write for IBM developerWorks get featured, either on the home page or in the particular "zone" in which they belong. Today I see that The ultimate mashup -- Web services and the semantic Web, Part 5: Change out Web services is on the home page. I'm particularly proud of this series, which introduces people to all kinds of concepts, from the Semantic Web to RDF and ontologies, which I find absolutely fascinating. Maybe it's the puzzle-solver in me, but the idea of trying to reconstruct the structure of information and how different pieces relate to each other fascinates me.
It's just an area that I don't feel people are taking seriously enough; this is where we're going, people! You may not like it, and it may be extra work, but somebody's going to figure out a way around that, just you wait.
I've just posted an introductory discusion on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). What's itneresting about it is it provides away to get around the cross-domain issues you get when you try to access web services using Ajax. Yahoo's now outputting JSON in a ridiculously easy way, so this is worth checking out.
I just posted some remarks on why I think we're seeing the very beginning of the end for Google.
Now available on IBM's developerWorks (and actually, featured on the home page!): Create a problem determination scenario from scratch:
This tutorial chronicles the building of an autonomic computing system that monitors a Java application to demonstrate the ability to detect and resolve issues within the system, a problem determination scenario. In the autonomic computing world, a problem determination scenario is one in which you can demonstrate how an overall system can detect, diagnose, and resolve problems. The Problem Determination Scenario, which you can download from the developerWorks Autonomic computing content area, is an example of a system that does just that by showing you how you can use the various pieces of the Autonomic Computing Toolkit together. In this tutorial, you can follow along and create each piece of our own simple problem determination scenario, which will give you an in-depth understanding of key autonomic computing concepts by using the Generic Log Adapter Runtime and Rule sets, the Resource Model Builder, and the Autonomic Management Engine.In other words, it tells you how to build a system that fixes itself.
Technorati tags: Autonomic Computing | IBM
Now live on DevSource -- Creating a GUI Feedreader using C++, Part 1: A No-Brainer Guide to UML: "If you've never used the Uniform Modeling Language (UML) before, it can seem a little intimidating. However, UML is actually not all that difficult, once you get to be familiar with the different diagrams and how they can help you to model and document your project. This article takes you through the process of modeling an application using UML, explaining each of the different diagrams, and the basics of how they work. When you're done, you'll have enough of an understanding of UML to document your own project. You'll also have enough of an understanding to delve into UML's finer points without feeling overwhelmed."
Note that this is also the first article chronicling the development of ChaosCrusher, an RSS/Atom/syndication feedreader that will hopefully do what I want a feedreader to do.
Almost a year ago, I wrote about what I want in an RSS aggregator, and now, as I actually write one in C++ (see, I told you I was doing it) I've gone back and found that all of those requests are still valid. And I still don't see anybody doing all of it.
I've actually got a pretty good track record of seeing trends as they're coming along, but I've never before been forced to actually write my predictions down. This year, all of us InformIT guides took it upon ourselves to document our predictions for the coming year. I sweated over mine for about 3 days, and I'm actually pretty happy with the results. (We'll see how happy I am in 11 months. :)) They're posted in the guide itself, but I've also reposted them in the blog, as Predictions for 2005, part 1 and Predictions for 2005, part 2. I wish I could have gotten them all in one posting, but there it is.
Now featured on IBM developerWorks -- Use the GLA with the Log and Trace Analyzer with Release 2 of the Autonomic Computing Toolkit: The GLA and LTA are Eclipse-based tools that enable logs to be parsed for occurrences of pre-defined events, relate those events to situations, and recommend actions based on information in a knowledge base. This tutorial is of particular interest to developers and administrators of applications with dependencies on multiple servers, such as DB2, Apache, and WebSphere. The key lesson imparted here is how to use the GLA to create your own adapter for custom application logs. Additionally, the tutorial introduces the underlying elements of the log adapter process. These low-level enablers of autonomic computing systems are an important contributor to the creation of more autonomic computing systems. This tutorial takes you through an example of how high-level open standards, such as the Common Base Event description, can be incorporated into development and administration functions at a practical level.
My article, Working With Avalon Today: Getting started with XAML, has been posted on DevSource. The blurb:
I'm just to blasted tired to elaborate at the moment, so if you don't already know that I've written more tutorials for IBM than ... well ... just about anybody -- I think Doug Tidwell has edged me out, but that's about it -- you'll just have to take my word for it.
This weekend I gave a presentation at the Florida Association of Computer Users' Groups conference, which was quite enjoyable. I'll elaborate later, but for those of you looking for the link to that presentation I promised you, here it is.
More later...
I've been trying to catch up on my InformIT blog, and consequently have also been catching up on The Vanguard Science Fiction Report. Here are some things I've been talking about:
InformIT:
Mosh Ado About Nothing
A library of regular expressions
The Enterprise Service Bus
Feed of the week: The Open Source Vulnerability Database
The Vanguard Science Fiction Report
The Asimov legacy is safe
Hawking changes mind on alternate universes
Jerry Goldsmith dead at 75
Now on developerWorks, Tip: Use XForms to send and receive Web services messages: "One of the great strengths of XForms is the fact that an XForms client can send its data as XML, and that it receives XML in return. This capability can be exceptionally useful in the field of Web services, where that's exactly what gets sent and received: XML messages. In this tip, I'll look at how to use an XForms browser as a Web services client, sending a SOAP request and displaying the results directly in the browser."
Now featured on developerWorks: Using the Generic Log Adapter with the Log and Trace Analyzer
The GLA and LTA are Eclipse-based tools that enable logs to be parsed for occurrences of pre-defined events, relate those events to situations, and recommend actions based on information in a knowledge base. This tutorial is of particular interest to developers and administrators of applications with dependencies on multiple servers, such as DB2, Apache, and WebSphere. The key lesson imparted here is how to use the GLA to create your own adapter for custom application logs. Additionally, the tutorial introduces the underlying elements of the log adapter process. These low-level enablers of autonomic computing systems are an important contributor to the creation of more autonomic computing systems. This tutorial takes you through an example of how high-level open standards, such as the Common Base Event description, can be incorporated into development and administration functions at a practical level.
Now on developerWorks: Understand the Autonomic Management Engine
"The idea of an autonomic computing system is attractive -- who wouldn't want a system that knows what to look for, and what to do if it finds it? But, building one from scratch is too much of an undertaking for most shops. Fortunately, the Autonomic Management Engine simplifies the process. This tutorial explains how AME works and shows you how to embed it into one of your own applications."
This is actually pretty cool. Well, I think so, anyway. :)
Now on developerWorks -- The making of MetroSphere, Part 30: Overcome cross-site scripting limitations:
Unfortunately, not everyone on the Internet has good intentions. To prevent users from entering malicious code into submitted material, the designers of WebSphere Portal disabled the ability to submit HTML to the Portal through a Web form. This article explains how you can selectively allow HTML in user-submitted material.
Now in the XML Reference Guide over at : DOM and PHP
PHP has support for XML built in, but as far as production code, it's limited to SAX. You can install the DomDocument module, but you do, of course, have to have access to the actual server in order to use it. Fortunately, for those of you who, like me, use an external web server and don't have that kind of control, there's a simple way to get Document Object Model functionality. ...
This must be my week for being featured! Domino applications and the Portal API was featured in this week's IBM Portal News:
Lotus Domino is great for storing all sorts of information in one place, and WebSphere Portal is great for gathering information from all sorts of places. But how do you get the two of them together? One option is to directly incorporate your Domino data into your portal application using the WebSphere Portal API. This tutorial details the process for reading from, and writing to, a Domino database from within a portlet.
Now featured on the developerWorks home page: The making of MetroSphere, Part 29: Understand the web.xml and portlet.xml files
With all of the magic that goes on in the WebSphere® Portal Web interface, it's easy to forget that at its heart, a portlet application is just a collection of servlets and their supporting classes, strung together using the web.xml and portlet.xml files. As we moved to customize the MetroSphere.com experience, we realized that understanding just how these two files fit together was crucial to controlling items such as the initial title of a portlet window. This article explains the major pieces of these two files and how they control what you see in your portlet application.
I've been publishing for IBM for a couple of years now, so I don't even blink when they feature an article of mine, but this
is really cool. Last summer, I took a trip to Austin Texas to sit in on a session of IBM engineers talking about their brand new Autonomic Computing initiative. I came home and proposed about 15 articles and tutorials and such. Or was it 25? I can't remember now. It's been such a long road to get here -- I didn't write all of the pieces, but I've been involved in most of them in one way or another -- but it's still cool to see my "vision" out there for people to see.
Now the featured story on developerWorks: A quick tour of autonomic computing
Autonomic computing architecture is a range of software technologies that enable you to build an information infrastructure that can, to lesser and greater degrees, manage itself, saving countless hours (and dollars) in human management. And all this without giving up control of the system. This tutorial explains the concepts behind autonomic computing and looks at the tools at your disposal for making it happen -- today.
Now on InformIT in the XML Reference Guide: Java in XSLT: Extension Functions
Using XSLT to transform XML into another form has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is flexibility. When you want to change the output, you don't have to go back to the code, you simply have to change the XSLT style sheet. But it's easy to mistake this simplicity for shallowness. XSLT can enable you to do much more than simply reformatting text.
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: DOM and Perl
Perl was originally designed as a lnaguage for sorting through text, so it's not surprising that it is a good fit for XML. In fact, there are multiple ways to handle XML using Perl, so in this section we're going to look at manipulating DOM "objects" using the Perl XML::DOM module, available on CPAN. ...
Now updated on developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1: "This tutorial looks at making your application Web-services ready using WebSphere Studio's tools to wrap an existing application as a Web service, announce it using a UDDI directory, and to discover and use Web services within your applications. It also looks at how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server."
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: .NET and XMLReader
In the world of XML, it's natural to think of XML in terms of two contexts: DOM and SAX. DOM is flexible, in that it provides the ability to navigate around the document tree and make changes, but SAX is fast, in that it doesn't load the entire document into memory, looking instead at just a single node at a time in a forward-only, read-only manner. ...
Just posted at InformIT:
Microsoft has announced that it would hold off on the "minor changes" it would need to make to Internet Explorer in order to comply with the adverse ruling it received in the the Eolas case.
This case is the definition of ambivalence for me.
Sigh.
Well, I've finally gotten around to writing about .NET, with a section on DOM and .NET at the InformIT XML Reference Guide. It explains how to create an application in .NET that traverses the Document Object Model of an XML Document object. It uses Visual Basic .NET, but the concepts are the same for C#.
Well, I've finally taken the gloves off and posted a snarky posting to InformIT, What? You mean you can read an XML file from another application?
The scoop? Microsoft is now trying to patent methods for reading an XML file produced by another application as a way to keep companies from building competing products that read a Word file.
But I've dropped my usual objective demeanor on this one. Let's see if anybody notices or -- gasp -- comments on the InformIT blog. I hope so.
OK, the first posting from the list is up. News from the world of DSDL incorporates items number 2, 3, 4 and 5 and talks about Document Schema Definition Languages, which aims to make it easier to validate documents that have data from more than one namespace, such as a SOAP envelope or an XHTML document with SVG embedded within it.
I understand that there are people who read all of the blogs on their blogroll every day, or at least, every few days. And they even find time to comment on them. I want to know who these people are and how they manage to make a living.
I have, in essence, three blogs that I am supposed to be updating on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do at least three blogs a week for the XML Reference Guide, I've got this one, and I've got The Vanguard Science Fiction Report, which has been fallow so long I'm embarrassed to admit that it's mine. So today, now that the weeks of emergency room visits and surgeries in the family have settled down into the normal level of chaos, I sat down and went through my blogroll for potential posting material.
I thought it might be a little educational to document the "flow" of my surfing, and how it eventually gets turned into actual postings, so here is the list of the "first cut". These are postings that may eventually wind up on one of my three blogs:
And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:
Even I can't believe how long the list is.
As you can see, it's a rather eclectic group, but it also shows the pattern of how I surf. (Note that I didn't even touch Op-Ed News today, because I know I have enough material for this blog, which is the only place it belongs, or the W3C because I've adopted a "monthly" schedule for them on InformIT.)
Over the next week or so, you can see what makes the cut and what doesn't, and what leads to other things.
So I posted over at InformIT about How to survive the changes to IE.
So what are the actual changes? Well, it turns out to not be as bad as originally thought. The patent covers the automatic loading of an application that resides on a remote server, so a page either needs to avoid automatically loading the application or loading it from a remote server. For the former, IE will pop up a window asking the user to click a button to load the Active X control. For the latter, Microsoft has guidance on embedding the data directly into the page so that it doesn't actually have to be loaded remotely. They also provide a look at using JavaScript to create the object tag in such a way that the patent isn't violated, but you don't have to jump through a hundred hoops to keep the dialogue box from coming up.
What I want to know is: how does this embedding affect security? Is it possible that slimebags are currently embedding the code in the page to avoid warnings about downloading controls?
More fodder for discusson on InformIT: Technology, social norms, and why it matters
Does technology shape us, or do we shape technology? Or is it a little bit of both? I think there's an inexorable cycle, in which we find ourselves rocked by a new paradigm, then adjust to it as though we'd never lived without it, and then start all over again. For example, take just the last century or so. We started out terrified of electricity "leaking" out of wall sockets. Then, of course, we couldn't get along without it. Then came radio, and television. Once we were good and settled in there, we got computers. Then the Internet. Then the World Wide Web. (No, those last two are not the same.)
At the end of December, I wrote about The evils of escaped markup as seen by Normal Walsh. It was a well-though-out piece about why he doesn't like that people are using CDATA sections to escape potentially non-well-formed content, particularly in data feeds.
But the interesting thing to me is that I'd actually already written about this particular topic -- and in fact, this particular piece of Norman's -- last summer.
So far, nobody has noticed. Or if they have, they haven't commented.
I'm considering thinking of something completely ridiculous and controversial to say just to see if anybody notices. Suggestions welcome.
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: DOM and .NET
With XML so fundamental in Microsoft's .NET framework, it should come as no surprise that the ability to manipulate an XML document is built right into the system. In fact, although DOM Level 2.0 doesn't include a standard way to create or save a document, .NET makes it easy. In this section, we'll get a feel for how these manipulations work by using Visual Basic .NET to load a simple document, make some changes to it, and then save it back out to a file. (We'll be running directly from the command line, so if you're not familiar with GUI programming, don't worry.) ...
Over on my InformIT XML blog, I've noted that XML 1.1 is almost here, and not everybody is happy about it. Elliotte Rusty Harold specifically says "Don't use it."
Also, on a more lighthearted note, I've also noted over at the Vanguard Science Fiction Report that:
Now on developerWorks: DOM NodeFilters and XML data binding: Using a DOM NodeFilter lets you control the contents of a set of XML data without touching the base application, but the NodeFilter itself is still a class, and needs to be recompiled in order to make any non-trivial changes. This tutorial explains how to build a system that enables a user to control both the criteria for a report and the structure of that criteria simply by providing XML input, either through a file or through a web service, using XML Data Binding.
Now on developerWorks: Grab headlines from a remote RSS file: This article shows you how to retrieve syndicated content and convert it into headlines for your site. Since no official format for such feeds exists, aggregators are often faced with the difficulty of supporting multiple formats, so Nick also explains how to use XSL transformations to more easily deal with multiple syndication file formats. (This was actually published in September.)
Now on developerWorks: Making of MetroSphere, Part 24: Giving the user control - the ultimate portal theme: The heart of the MetroSphere site is the community weblog, but we also want to give users the ability to create pages that reflect their own personalities. Portal enables an administrator to add a new theme to the site, but because allowing users to add a new theme involves unacceptable security risks, built-in capabilities limit user control to selecting from available themes. This tutorial explains how to give users much of the same power they would have by creating a new theme without actually creating one.
Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphere, Part 23: Send messages between portlets: Sometimes, in the development of a portal, you need two portlets to talk to each other. For example, on MetroSphere, when the user clicks a topic in the Topic List portlet, the team needs the information to be sent not only to the Topic List portlet, but also to the Show Blog portlet. This portlet describes the process for sending messages between portlets and recording the information in the PortletSession object.
Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphe