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20040625 e premte qershor 25, 2004

Have your RSS feed render directly in a browser

Through Brian D Foy, Sean Burke on Making RSS Pretty. I would go for the CSS approach.

( Qer 25 2004, 05:16:38 PD PDT ) Permalink Comments [1] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

"There's GOLD in them thar blogs!"

From Marc Canter Tantek goes a data mining.

Tantek Çelik is leaving Microsoft and going to work for Technorati.
I agree with Marc, Technorati's lucky to get Tantek on board!

( Qer 25 2004, 05:10:38 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

Link: High Context - Earth Shaking RSS

Another excellent use of RSS: get a feed containing all the earth shakes in real time! There's been one of magnitude 3.6 2 hours ago in Alaska.

Weblog: High Context
Source: Earth Shaking RSS
Link: http://www.highcontext.com/wp/archives/2004/06/24/earth-shaking-rss/

The U.S. Geological Survey publishes an RSS feed of the recent quakes the register greater than 2.5 magnitude. Excellent use of RSS! I was amazed at how many quakes happen each day around the world after I subscribed to this feed.

Spotted via WorldChanging blog.

[PubSub: rome rss]

( Qer 25 2004, 05:05:36 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

RSS Readers as the universal client for event notifications

Monitor Windows Event Logs with RSS describes an interesting application of RSS to carry Windows event logs: I knew this kind of applications would emerge (I have proposed to do it at Sun a few months ago). The RSS aggregators are replacing the browser for anything that is event based. Event logs, SNMP, JMS messages, JMX Notifications, I can see all these types of notifications soon available in a RSS client near you.

Greg Reinacker created code to generate a RSS feed from the Windows Event Logs.

Another innovative use of RSS. Not quite MOM, but handy nonetheless

You can download ithere

[Microsoft WebBlogs]

( Qer 25 2004, 04:43:24 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

20040617 e enjte qershor 17, 2004

Nick Lothian joins the Rome project as a developer

We're proud to announce that Nick Lothian, alias BadMagicNumber of Classifier4J fame (a text classification library, including a an implementation of a Bayesian classifier) joined Project Rome as a developer today.

Following this email:

I've been using Rome a bit since you released it, and generally I'm pretty impressed.

One suggestion I have is for support of conditional gets (see http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2002/10/21/http_conditional_get_for_rss_hackers ) and gzip encoding handling to be built into the library itself.

we've had a discussion in the Rome dev mailing list and he came up with some code to implement it. This will be structured as an external library, since many people developing their own fetcher system may want to use Rome just for the parsing and generation and we want to keep the library small and focused. This fetcher library will be part of the Rome codebase, in the modules directory, and be released on its own schedule.

We're really glad that Nick chose to contribute this to Rome: this is an aspect that was handled by Mark Pilgrim's Universal Parser Python library that we had no time to implement, and I'm sure many developers will use this to create their fetcher.

( Qer 17 2004, 04:52:31 MD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

A practical application of the Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines koan Zoe comments on my post about Rome 0.2 removing as many dependencies we could:
"we don't do our XML manually"... right... on the other hand, jdom-b10.tar.gz is a 3.4M (!?!?!) download and the jdom jar itself is 144KB... which is larger than the entire rome-0.2.jar (128KB)... what's wrong with this picture? I'm sure that you can do better than that and remove the *last* external dependency :) 

# ls -la /usr/bin/ls
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        19084 Apr  6  2002 /usr/bin/ls
# ls -la /usr/bin/grep
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        10232 Apr  6  2002 /usr/bin/grep

ls and grep (on my system:-) "weight" 29314 bytes.

The following utility program (shell script) weights 16 bytes.

ls -la | grep $1

Should I reimplement a custom version of ls and grep to create my utility or is it better to just reuse these "bloated" 30K of code for my 16 bytes utility?

See Eric Raymond's excellent koan about this, Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines.

There's nothing wrong with this picture.
Master Bar would even argue that there is no picture at all, but that's another exercise:-)

I looked at Zoe: looks really cool. I will try it out.

( Qer 17 2004, 04:37:59 MD PDT ) Permalink Comments [2] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

The rich client/thin client debate As I explained in a previous post, last week BEA's Adam Bosworth unveiled his Alchemy intelligent caching framework. John Udell who's been playing at the limits of browser based XML applications since a long time, is bullish about it, in Thin clients and rich data - BEA's Alchemy promises mobile users a blend of browser-based ease and rich functionality. It seems like Alchemy is going to be open source: I look forward to get the bits and play with it! At the same time, Mozilla's Brendan Eich defines the goals and requirements for Mozilla 2.0 Virtual Machine.
Back to the more programming-language-specific points above: comments welcome on realistic candidates. Obvious and controversial possibilities include Mono, Java (if open source), and Parrot (last I looked, *way* too Perl6-focused, not very mature, not looking likely to mature quickly).
Wouldn't it be ironic if Mozilla's VM is Mono so that the main language for Mozilla apps would be C#? I sincerely hope it will be java. Then Joel Spolsky published a long and thoughtful essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War, where, when talking about web applications vs rich client he says:

But there's a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web application:

  1. Create a fast drawing program
  2. Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
  3. Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
  4. Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
  5. Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
  6. Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet
It's this last problem that BEA's Alchemy is tackling. Add to this a solid VM in Mozilla, and good SVG support, for richer browser based applications and you have a decent alternative to the return of the rich client that Microsoft is pushing with .NET. Interesting times. ( Qer 17 2004, 04:16:30 MD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

Happy Bloomsday... 2 days too late June 16th was the 100th anniversary of that June 16th 1904 where Leopold Bloom reenacted the Odyssey in Dublin in James Joyce's novel Ulysse. I've never finished Ulysse, although I tried 3 times. I guess I started too late, at a period in my life where I don't have enough time to tackle giant books like "Ulysse", or Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". However I liked the ambition of the book, and the style very much (I still salivate when thinking about roasted kidneys: my grandma used to cook them just right), and will maybe find the time to read it someday. Brian Nitz has a good account of Bloomsday in Dublin this year in his weblog. ( Qer 17 2004, 03:47:54 MD PDT ) Permalink Comments [3] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

A few interesting posts about the future of RSS aggregators

RSS aggregation, wether on the client or on the server is a hot topic these days.
I'm myself really excited about this area: this is why my team released the Rome RSS/Atom java library on java.net 2 weeks ago.

In the past few days I've seen a few posts in various weblogs or sites that point in the right direction.

My favorite is Phil Ringnalda's post That old hopeful feeling.

The main theme of the post is how badly supported republishing os done in the current crop of aggregators. I couldn't agree more. My own information consumption and generation practices have evolved with the tools I've used: I initially used Radio Userland. I used the included aggregator, that displayed the feeds in an IE browser window, and ctrl-clicked the POST button in front of all interesting entries. Then I would go through all the new browser windows, remove some of the text of the item, italicize the part I wanted to quote, add a comment in the IE only editor, then post the stuff to my Radio weblog. Then I moved to Movable Type and NetNewsWire to read feeds. Here double clicked on interesting items to read them in Mozilla or Firefox, and either use the blog poster from NetNewsWire, or the MT admin UI to post them. But as time went by I blogged less and less and ended up pushing many single links to my de.licio.us linkblog. I haven't found the perfect workflow yet, but NetNewsWire begins to show its limits, and I haven't found the perfect blog server for my personal blog yet.

One quote in his post that rings a bell for me is:

Not one of them says anything about having any real interest in the format used to deliver the feeds they consume. Why would they? That's a library function, parsing feeds and normalizing them into native data structures. It's the data that's interesting, not the format that you never see.

This is exactly why we started the Rome project!

Then Russel Beattie who's one of my favorite java bloggers, has this very good post Weblog Systems vs. Aggregators finally realizes that aggregators, especially server side ones, are the important part of the blogging toolset today, and talks about writing his own: just use Rome to parse your feeds Russ:-)

Last, at O'Reilly, in RSS: The Next Generation Giles Turnbull reviews 3 Mac OS X client side aggregators: NetNewsWire, Shrook and PulpFiction. NetNewsWire defined the genre, PulpFiction steals Apple Mail UI and adds archving, and Shrook steals Apple's iTunes UI and adds an interesting server side feed list and distributed checkin. I've tried them all, and still use NetNewsWire, but think the most satisfying solution will come from a server side solution. PulpFiction is not very interesting: a server side RSS to mail gateway will let you use your regular mail client to view feeds and apply filters. Shrook has the most interesting ideas, with keeping the feed list on the server side, but today the protocol for that is not open so you have to use their server.

This is an area where I think we're lacking a standard: I think the future is in server side aggregators, but people may want to still use their client side aggregator in certain situations. In order for this to work we need a standard protocol to reconcile feed lists from both sides. I was thinking about using SyncML for the protocol, to reconcile differences between the OPML files on both sides. I'll propose the idea to Brent Simmons, who made NetNewsWire.

( Qer 17 2004, 03:34:34 MD PDT ) Permalink Comments [2] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

Roller bug: bookmark images need to be included directly when the image name begins with http:// Nice catch by Torrey McMahon in the Sun bloggers mailing list today.
We need to fix that in Roller.

Torrey McMahon wrote:
I noticed that the bookmarks allow you to set images. I went through and
added a few but the links get set related to the blog page. For example:
If I configd the icon to be

    http://i.cnn.net/cnn/.element/img/1.1/logo/logo.gif

it gets turned into

    /roller/resources/torrey/http://i.cnn.net/cnn/.element/img/1.1/logo/logo.gif

Is there a way to fix that?

This is a Roller bug.
If you look at your template:

Website/Pages/Template/Weblog template
There's something like this
        <div class="sidebarBox">
            <div class="links">
                #showBookmarks("Blogroll" true false)
            </div>
        </div>
       
        <div class="sidebarBox">
            <div class="links">
                #showBookmarks("News" true false)
            </div>
        </div>

Then in Roller code
web/WEB-INF/classes/bookmark.vm
#macro( showOneBookmark $bookmark )
    #if( $utilities.isNotEmpty( $bookmark.Image ) )
        <a href="$bookmark.Url"><img alt="$bookmark.Name"
        src="$baseURL#showResourcePath()/$bookmark.Image" /></a><br />

$bookmark.Image should be checked for the uri scheme first: if there is one and it is http, then $bookmark.Image should be used and not prefixed with $baseURL#showResourcePath()/
I've added that to my weblog in the blogs.sun.com category, that I use to track the requirements for Sun Roller.
Later on we'll create an aggregated site with this category to get all the requirements.

( Qer 17 2004, 04:20:29 PD PDT ) Permalink Comments [2] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

20040616 e mërkurë qershor 16, 2004

Rome Atom/RSS utility library version 0.2 released today One week between releases: we told you it was an alpha:-)
We've been working quite a bit this week to incorporate the feedback we received so far.
Tonight I'm too tired but tomorrow I'll post an entry with links to the various feedback we've had, and comments about these.

The main one was to reduce dependencies to the maximum: we've done that, now Rome depends only on JDK 1.4 and Jdom (sorry folks we don't do our XML manually here).

We also included the samples in the source tree.
Then we've renamed a few classes and methods and fixed a few missing things.
See the changelog for the details.

Current Rome users, you can download the latest bits from the Rome Wiki's main page.

SPQR

( Qer 16 2004, 02:08:35 MD PDT ) Permalink Comments [2] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

20040615 e martë qershor 15, 2004

Rumor: Oracle buying BPM vendor Collaxa, sources say Infoworld reports the rumor that Oracle would buy BPM vendor Collaxa.
This would be a smart move for Oracle, as I said last week Collaxa's BPEL server is really a nice piece of software and BPEL servers will be all the rage this year as corporations start to implement SOA.
But it's only a rumor: let's see how it unfolds: JavaOne will be a hot event this year!

( Qer 15 2004, 09:48:24 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

20040614 e hënë qershor 14, 2004

Category specific feeds in Roller

Following a question by a colleague from Sun about the possibility to have category specific feeds in Roller, here's the answer.

Category filtering is part of the product already: this is one of the main interest of using a dynamic system such as Roller as opposed to a static/generation based system such as MT where all this stuff has to be regenerated all the time, and at least pre-generated: you just need to add the ?catname=your_category_here parameter to get a filtered output

However at the aggregated sitewide rss level it does not seem to work.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss?catname=blogs.sun.com yields nothing.

I need to look into how it's implemented to determine why.

In order to take advantage of that you need to add urls like these in your Roller theme. The Sun theme will need to have these. ( Qer 14 2004, 03:36:38 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

Wordpress founder Matthew Mullenweg comments about blogs.sun.com

Wordpress founding developer Matthew Mullenweg has posted a few constructive comments about blogs.sun.com. He mostly points to things we need to configure and expose better.

I copy my answer here for my pals managing blogs.sun.com: I have created a blogs.sun.com category for this weblog. Please fellow Sun bloggers to the same so that we can filter the aggregated blogs with the category="blogs.sun.com" query and get a project requirements list autogenerated for the site.

Let's answer in order here:

20040610 e enjte qershor 10, 2004

Link: Collaxa BPEL Server 2.0 RC7

My friend Edwin Khodabakchian left Netscape a few years ago to start Collaxa with an ex-NetDynamics exec. They develop a BPEL server. BPEL4WS , or Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, is " a notation for specifying business process behavior based on Web Services". It's been initially proposed by IBM against Microsoft's XLANG notation, and has gained some traction in the java world in the past 2 years. It is now being standardized by the OASIS

Edwin has a lot of experience in this area: while at Netscape in 1997 he had designed a now defunct workflow server called Netscape Process Manager, with the server engine initially in server side javascript (then moved to java) and the visual process designer as a Swing java application (I remember Jeremy Chone showing me how he unit tested the designer in javascript using Rhino:-).

Collaxa's server is mature now, it's been out for more than 2 years, if my memory's good. It runs on multiple app servers, and last year they released a very nice visual process desginer based on the Eclipse platform. The architecture they chose is very interesting and is a sign of the current return to rich client UIs and the dazzling array of architectural options for these: last time I looked the visual part of the modeler was done in SVG and javascript, in an embedded Eclipse Browser component, with Rhino I guess to drive the UI! I wonder if they switched to Batik now.

I've done a test drive of a beta of an old version of their server in their office last year when I came to Silicon Valley: I found it really easy to setup and use, and with many nice functionalities. One thing I liked was their JBPEL language which lets you nicely mesh BPEL processes and J2EE code.

If you're shopping for a BPEL server, I heartily recommend you to take a look at Collaxa. Here's Edwin's annoucement.

RC7 is out. On the server side, a lot of work has been done on resiliency and fail-over/crash testing. On the designer side, we upgraded to Eclipse M8 and added an Excel-like XPATH function builder. We are excited to announce that after 16 months of beta testing and preview releases, we are on target for the GA release in June!

Update: This release comes with a new BPEL Getting Started Guide. [Organic BPEL]

As a side note I recommend you Edwin's blog, Organic BPEL, which is always insighful and full of information about BPEL and SOA. To quote BEA's Adam Bosworth:

Edwin Khodabakchian (who I consistently regard as one of the most interesting people working on the web today) says he is going to try and mock this up for me. Awesome!
That was last october, and the thing he talks about mocking up is the idea that Adam developed back then, which he developed and finally unveiled 3 days ago as the Alchemy intelligent caching framework.

( Qer 10 2004, 06:33:09 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It


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