January 28, 2006

JSON: Ajax without the cross-domain issues

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.

Posted by roadnick at 05:14 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

March 01, 2005

Yahoo releases web services API

Check it out over on the InformIT blog...

Posted by roadnick at 03:21 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

February 06, 2005

One click, yes. One aggregator, NO.

I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.

Posted by roadnick at 05:46 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

What I want in an aggregator

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.

Posted by roadnick at 11:53 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

May 13, 2004

Mozilla and the potential for interaction

Ever heard of XUL? It's a new way of building web applications in Mozilla (and the newer versions of Netscape). Kind of like a "super" form, with all kinds of interactivity available. I still haven't had time to fool around with it, despite a brief interlude when it looked like I might have to write a tutorial on it, but check out the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a very cool look at what you can do with it. This link is via Jono Bacon's Mozilla and the potential for interaction, which is itself an interesting read, considering the idea of porting applications such as OpenOffice to XUL.

Cool.

Posted by roadnick at 09:05 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

Why I like XInclude

XInclude, designed to make it easier to include part of one XMl document into another, has been a neglected specification for a long time. Now Bob DuCharme gives a good example of how it can be useful with Transclude with XInclude (and XPointer!). It still doesn't address the security issues, but OK, there you are.

Posted by roadnick at 08:20 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

February 03, 2004

Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1

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."

Posted by roadnick at 05:56 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

January 25, 2004

DOM and .NET

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#.

Posted by roadnick at 03:59 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

January 18, 2004

199 reasons I'm behind

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:

  1. Incremental XML Parsing and Validation in a Text Editor
  2. XML 2003 session report: Combining multiple vocabularies without tears
  3. XML 2003 session report: News from the world of DSDL
  4. ISO/IEC 19757 - DSDL Document Schema Definition Languages
  5. Namespace Routing Language (NRL)
  6. Extreme Markup Languages 2004
  7. Escaping the Googlearchy
  8. Blogging Locally
  9. DocBook NG: The “Absinthe” Release
  10. DocBook NG: The “Bourbon” Release
  11. Going to Extremes!
  12. New Year Resolutions 2004.
  13. Reuters: Google Planning Email-based AdWords Service
  14. John Battelle's Searchblog
  15. eBay = The Fed
  16. IBM Almaden Research Center WebFountain
  17. Rocket Man
  18. Fontifier
  19. The XML in Apple's Keynote
  20. A specious supercomputer argument in the Irish Times
  21. Draconian XML processing
  22. Sleep Paralysis
  23. Spontaneous screen videos
  24. Dynamic categories
  25. Turning consumers into producers
  26. Server-based XPath search
  27. Databases get a grip on XML
  28. Thinking the Unthinkable about Microsoft
  29. Longhorn SDK
  30. PhotoGallery
  31. Two Laws of Explanation
  32. SIMILE : Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments
  33. Quint on the FREDDY VS JASON dvd
  34. An Assload Of New Trailers Online!! STEPFORD, CB:TM, HIDALGO, SPARTAN, SCOOBY 2, ALGIERS, TOKYO GODFATHERS!!
  35. Van Helsing Trailer
  36. Batman Already On_SMALLVILLE??
  37. The WB's Stillborn FEARLESS!!
  38. WONDERFALLS
  39. Craigslist RSS Search Script
  40. Simplerwork
  41. Your final 3 hours
  42. Lost Who episode found
  43. SCI FI picks up Andromeda, Beastmaster
  44. Casting for Hitchhiker's Guide announced
  45. A real "space opera" in development from Turing Opera Workshop
  46. LeGuin's Earthsea to become Sci-Fi Mini-series
  47. Perchance to dream - anything you like with the fantasy machine
  48. A Real-Life Debate on Free Expression in a Cyberspace City
  49. 2003 in Review: DRM Technology
  50. Northwest gave U.S. data on passengers
  51. Luke Cage Making Progress at Sony
  52. CONFIRMED: Bob Hoskins Part of the Mask Cast
  53. Comic Book: The Movie Trailer Online!
  54. ELEKTRA MOVIE UPDATE
  55. Pre-Order the 2004 Superhero Movie Novelizations!
  56. JetBlue Redux: Northwest is guilty of violating passenger privacy
  57. New tech claims to detect lying in real time
  58. Safety killed the (Hubble) telescope star
  59. A version of Windows for every geek worthy of that name
  60. MoveOn.org demonstrates the growing power of the 'net in US politics
  61. Bush outlines plan for moon rendezvous by 2020
  62. The Internet gives a voice to Death Row, but not everyone's happy
  63. The Battle of Serenity Game
  64. Get your name.name domain
  65. US using EU airline data to 'test' CAPPS II snoop system
  66. SCO sort of thinks there are Linux IP violations, but isn't quite sure
  67. Niue is dead! Long live .nu!
  68. Nokia to release Perl for smartphones
  69. CinemaNow debuts download-to-own movies
  70. Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study
  71. We finally made it! Confluence 1.0b1!
  72. Wondering why your WAR is slow? Think of your timezone!
  73. SiteMesh Overview
  74. Jira
  75. The anatomy of a bug
  76. Sauron’s Eminent Domain
  77. Find Some Free Fonts
  78. Format an RSS Feed and Put It On Your Site
  79. New Google Features -- Travel and Tracking Numbers
  80. Watching Google Like a Hawk
  81. YSearch
  82. Google Labs
  83. PR Newswire's RSS (RDF Site Summary) Feed
  84. PR Bop
  85. Sun Announces Preview of Java Studio Creator Application Development Tool
  86. Integration: From Big Bang to Controlled Explosions
  87. Steve Mills On The IBM-Microsoft Web Services Partnership
  88. BEA, Microsoft, and Tibco Release WS-Eventing Specification
  89. StrikeIron Announces General Availability of the StrikeIron Web Services Analyzer
  90. Web Services in Action: Aligning IT with Business Objectives
  91. WS-I Make Available Drafts of Basic Profile Attachments Work
  92. BizDex: ebXML And Web Services To Go The Last Mile
  93. Four Ways to Know Your WSDL
  94. A Design Center for Web Services
  95. Mindreef Announces Availability of SOAPscope 3.0 Web Services Diagnostics System
  96. DreamFactory Launches Browser-Based Tool For Developing Rich Web Services Client
  97. Web Services Networks
  98. If You Like Web Services Standards You Would Love XML 2003
  99. Patterns: Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services - IBM Redbook
  100. Decentralised social networking
  101. Looking For a Gig
  102. On Postel, Again
  103. Technology Predictor Success Matrix
  104. History of XML Error Handling
  105. On Writing XML
  106. The truth about XML
  107. Microsoft Web services plan targets Java
  108. Straight talk on Web services
  109. Longhorn and the battle for Web services
  110. Breaking the logjam on Web services
  111. The real deal on .Net
  112. Taking XML's measure
  113. Longhorn and the battle for Web services
  114. Why Microsoft needs IBM this time around
  115. Developers gripe about IE standards inaction
  116. Raising the XML flag
  117. A Web services wish list
  118. Novell targets Web services security
  119. Free Writing and Music - as in Speech (MLP)
  120. What Good is the Second Amendment?
  121. CBS May Reject MoveOn.org Superbowl Ad
  122. Simulating Psychosis
  123. What Good is the Bill of Rights?
  124. Mars photo
  125. Pros and fans
  126. Which Star Trek Captain are you?
  127. Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you?
  128. Lot auctions
  129. Rental Car Horror Story
  130. Isle of Man is the new M4 corridor
  131. Death of the desktop on the way in three years
  132. 5 years ago... Politicians warned to watch out for the web
  133. SAP Launches RFID Solution
  134. EFF Files Amicus in DirecTV 11th Circuit Appeal
  135. ACLU Defends Rush's Privacy Rights
  136. Web cam watchers help woman kicked by horse
  137. Security experts look to agriculture for virus clues
  138. Farenheit 451 + 1984 = Paranoia
  139. Hack for the Homeless: Primative Yet Useful
  140. A 'Xen' State of Being
  141. Secrecy Suddenly a Campaign Issue
  142. CBS Shields Pigskin Fans From Ads
  143. Florida Video Law: Parents Decide
  144. Diebold Gets Stay in California
  145. Doc Claims Human Clone Implant
  146. Off To A Good Start
  147. Cutting The Cheese
  148. Movable Style
  149. YAHTZEE!
  150. The Perfect 404
  151. Elastic Design
  152. Creativity
  153. Back to CSS Basics 3
  154. TouchGraph
  155. Off-Site Popups
  156. Microsoft: Communicate Or Die
  157. Innovation is Useless
  158. Top 20 Groups
  159. Carnival of the Capitalists by Ensight.org
  160. Back to Basics Part 3 — What’s in a hack?
  161. HTTP error pages for weblogs!
  162. Cute cuddly robots of DOOM
  163. Church Sign Generator used for fraud!
  164. Tat, meet tit
  165. Whidbey Integrated Web Services
  166. More on WS-Eventing
  167. WS-Security meets Kerberos
  168. Dutchtub
  169. Disaster photos
  170. Better MIDI sounds
  171. Scaling the Death Stars
  172. Honda Civic as H-Wing
  173. A Taste of Our Own Poison
  174. New "everyday neuroscience" book from author of Emergence
  175. nevermind
  176. and the winners are
  177. “Go find me a way to do this.”
  178. more please
  179. Common(s) Sense of Thomas Paine
  180. Dems on the Supreme Court
  181. 11 Top US Papers Ignoring Cheney's Pending Bribery Investigation
  182. Let's Send W to Mars
  183. PETA Gives Birth to Baby PETA
  184. Barlow on Spalding Gray: "Is he finally swimming to Cambodia?"
  185. Conservatives ALWAYS ADMIT THEYRE WRONG -- a hundred years later!
  186. more adventures in DEHUMANIZATION
  187. Sean Penn, DynCorp, and I TOLD YOU SO
  188. Bush environmental "achievements" for 2003: from Sierra Club's list
  189. Dr Phil versus Maury Povich - who'd win in a fight? (stuff that just aint right #2)
  190. Paranoid fears coming true in Ashcroft era
  191. And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:

  192. Arabica
  193. Render X Barcodes
  194. XQuisitor
  195. <oxygen />
  196. XMLBuddy™ 2.0
  197. Relaxer
  198. Render X XEP XSL Rendering Engine
  199. Python bindings for XML Security Library
  200. Mozilla 1.6 (now supporting "XML, CSS, XSLT, XUL, HTML, XHTML, MathML, SVG, and lots of other crunchy XML goodness.")

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.

Posted by roadnick at 10:25 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

The evils of escaped markup

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.

Posted by roadnick at 09:03 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

December 19, 2003

The relevance of standards bodies

So I was thinking over at InformIT about standards bodies and their relevance, but my really big question is this: what would happen if we all decided NOT to use an accepted standard, and used something else instead?

I mean, seriously. What if a group of scientists decided not to use the "accepted" names for the elements, or renamed the planets or something? I mean, there's no law about it, right?

Posted by roadnick at 11:39 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

November 14, 2003

Natural Language Processing

Unfortunately, I still don't have the time to devote to it that I'd like, but all this talk about Chatbots has gotten me thinking about Natural Language Processing. fieldmethods.net is an NLP-oriented portal that seems to have interesting information.

Posted by roadnick at 11:59 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

November 09, 2003

Grab headlines from a remote RSS file

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.)

Posted by roadnick at 10:52 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

November 06, 2003

The XML book business

I am pretty darn proud of XML Primer Plus. I knew the subject well, and I worked hard on it. I also feel good about the fact that it covers not only Java, but also C++, VB.NET, Perl, and PHP, thanks to the help of some additional writers. The reviews have all been good, and even the four star review on Amazon says that the only reason he didn't give me five stars is because he feels that that levels should be reserved for "recognized experts in the field," which I clearly am not.

But sales have been, frankly, disappointing. I was feeling really bad about it -- until I found out that The XML Book Business is in the toilet. With very few exceptions (and frankly I can't think of any), nobody's XML books are selling.

So tell me, are you buying XML books? Why or why not?

Posted by roadnick at 11:17 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

March 04, 2003

SAX-like apps in PHP

Now on IBM developerWorks: SAX-like apps in PHP -- While there is no official implementation of the Simple API for XML (SAX) in PHP, PHP does provide a SAX-like method for working with both local and remote XML files. In this article, author Nicholas Chase shows you how to work with XML files in PHP by building and setting handler functions and creating a parser. He demonstrates SAX in PHP with a page-building exercise in which he crafts a page based on the result of an Amazon Web Services query.

Posted by roadnick at 09:30 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

February 06, 2003

Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5

Now on IBM developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5 (Tutorial) -- This tutorial shows you how to make your application Web-services ready using the tools in WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5. You will learn how to wrap an existing application as a Web service and announce it using a UDDI directory and to discover and use Web services within your applications. The tutorial also explains how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server.

Posted by roadnick at 09:01 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

November 01, 2002

Building an Amazon storefront using SOAP and the WSDK

Now on IBM developerWorks: Building an Amazon storefront using SOAP and the WSDK (Tutorial) -- This tutorial is for developers who want to use SOAP to access the Amazon product database through Amazon Web Services (AWS). It shows you how to use the IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services (WSDK) to create Java classes from the Amazon Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, demonstrates the use of those classes, and then examines the process of using the WSDK to turn the classes into a Web application and Amazon storefront.

Posted by roadnick at 08:58 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

August 02, 2002

Understanding Java Factories

Now on InformIT.com: Understanding Java Factories -- How do factories work, and how can you use them in your own applications? Create two different "ferrets," and see how using a factory allows you to choose which one is actually loaded at any given time.

Posted by roadnick at 01:59 PM | Comments () | TrackBack

June 11, 2002

Introduction to ebXML

Now on IBM developerWorks: Introduction to ebXML (Tutorial) -- Whereas EDI for years has provided a usable but expensive way for companies to exchange information in an automated manner, ebXML now provides a means for companies to integrate their processes much more easily. Based on XML, it provides a methodology for business to determine what information they should exchange and how, as well as a set of specifications to allow automation of the process. This tutorial gives an overview of ebXML, explaining how all of the pieces fit together.

Posted by roadnick at 12:33 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

June 09, 2002

Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere

Now on IBM developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere (Tutorial) -- The Site Developer configuration of WebSphere Studio and WebSphere Application Server ease the pain of integrating Web services with your application. This tutorial looks at making your application Web services-ready using Site Developer's tools. It takes you through the process of wrapping an existing application as a Web service, announcing it using a UDDI directory, and discovering and using Web services within your applications. It also looks at how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server.

Posted by roadnick at 08:59 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

May 21, 2002

Building Web service applications with the Google API

Now on IBM developerWorks: Building Web service applications with the Google API (Tutorial) -- The Google search engine can now be accessed via a SOAP-based Web service. This means that developers can now embed Google search results and other information into their own applications. Google also took this project one step further, creating an API and Java toolkit for accessing the data. This tutorial is for developers who want to use Google information from within their Java applications.

Posted by roadnick at 12:34 AM | Comments () | TrackBack

April 12, 2002

Tip: Send and receive SOAP messages with JAXM

Now on IBM developerWorks: Tip: Send and receive SOAP messages with JAXM -- In this tip, author and developer Nicholas Chase shows you how to use the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) to simplify the process of creating and sending SOAP messages.

Posted by roadnick at 09:40 AM | Comments () | TrackBack