Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Web Services Pitfalls Web Services Pitfalls. The web services vision of automated business sometimes sounds too good to be true. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] This is an excellent look at some of the issues in web services deployments. It is for exactly these reasons that things like UDDI are pretty much worthless. There is no magic here, contracts and lawyers aren't going to go away. If you believe the hype then you believe they are. Don't believe the hype! Web services are useful, they're not a revolution. 10:45:04 PM     Even more on CSS Referring to the previous post Sam asks what I would rather store in Xindice. The answer is neither. I've never considered what's served to the client as being the real representation. It is always simply a view onto the real content. And there is absolutely nothing that says data has to be served in only one format. 9:47:33 PM     More on CSS Sam is saying " Want to see clean separation of content and presentation?  View source on diveintomark or wannabegirl.  Would you rather the source to this webpage or one of theirs be stored in Xindice? "[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] Unfortunately the basis is off here. Sam is approaching it from the perspective of whether CSS is a good thing or not. I'm approaching it from the perspective of whether it actually works or not. Dave was getting pushback from someone saying they wouldn't use Radio because it didn't support "standards" where standards meant CSS. My perspective is that, that is just wrong. I'm in complete agreement that CSS is a good technology and that sites "should" be built with good technology. Unfortunately the sad fact remains that CSS-P is difficult to implement and that if the browser doesn't get it exactly right things can go very wrong. In reality though, Omniweb is just the latest example of this. I don't know how many sites I've been to in the last few years that were made completely unreadable because they used CSS and the browser had some bug in it and couldn't display it correctly. Happened all the time with both Netscape and IE and now it happens with Omniweb. People pushing companies to use this concept of standards are simply out of line. Standards are supposed to increase interoperability, CSS-P doesn't work to increase interoperability. It's too hard to get right. They're basically applying pressure to companies and encouraging them to build products that will work for a smaller user base. Given how popular Radio and Omniweb are on OS X, bending to that pressure would be a critical mistake. CSS-P is not a safe technology today, and given how difficult it is to get it right, very well may never be. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not CSS-P is the "right" or "correct" or "ideal" way. 9:18:48 PM     Adding Jar Files to a Project Builder Project on Mac OS X I had some trouble figuring out exactly how to get Project Builder to add jar files to a Cocoa app and I'm going to guess other people might too. So I'm sharing my experiences. 8:19:26 PM     Xindice Browser Screenshot and Config Alex didn't post any screens so here's a shot of Alex's browser running under Mac OS X. Also the default config uses the old dbXML values. If you try to run it against Xindice you need to change them. Driver: org.apache.xindice.client.xmldb.DatabaseImpl Root collection: xmldb:xindice:///db 5:10:12 PM     Xindice Browser Alexander Schatten has just announced a Swing client to browse the contents of a Xindice database. He says: I developed a small Java/Swing Browser for XIndice. You can browse with this tool a XIndice/dbXML database, show all collections in tree view, show all document indices of a collection and then show a document as source or tree view. Moreover you can send XPath queries to the server. I plan more features for the next releases. Nevertheless I think, this tool could be useful for some of you. Simply download the binary distribution and start it using the batch file. http://www.schatten.info/software/xindice_browser/xindice_browser.html or just go to my main page: http://www.schatten.info Alternatively you can also download the sources and build it using ant. 4:10:48 PM     Dave Winer says Would a designer please write a Table-less CSS Templates for Newbies, to explain why tables are evil. I don't get it. Or is this just gymnastics, which is cool, but tell us so, please. [Scripting News] I agree with Dave here, I want to know what's wrong with tables too. When I view this site with Omniweb the side bar overlaps with the body of the text. It's very difficult to read. Yes, yes, I know this is a problem with Omniweb, but Omniweb is a killer browser in so many ways. It comes from a little company who's killing them self trying to keep up with the bigs in this area. If you want to see competition restored to the browser market it's companies like OmniGroup that are going to do it. CSS positioning is obviously a technology that is extremely difficult to implement correctly. Even if it may be a W3C recommendation, it doesn't do anything to help interoperability of sites. Advanced client side functionality has been a consistent failure and will always be a failure unless you take the view that IE is the only client that matters. Microsoft loves this stuff. Want competition back in the browser market, don't use difficult to implement client side technologies unless they add very real end user value. Making it easier for the designer is not a solid justification for limiting your client base. I looked at the site in IE 5, and I see nothing where the use of CSS positioning adds any value to my experience. So I'm with Dave, I want to know why tables are so bad? 2:40:20 PM

© Copyright 2002 Kimbro Staken . Last update: 2/13/02; 10:46:40 PM . This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.

Resume:

Software:

Xindice (Formally dbXML)

Xindice XML-RPC Interface

Xindice HTTP Interface

XML:DB API Reference Implementation

Jive XML Database Port

FreeDB CD Database to XML Data Generator

Writing:

Introduction to Native XML Databases (xml.com)

Introduction to dbXML (xml.com)

An Introduction to the XML:DB API (xml.com)

Xindice Users Guide

Xindice Developers Guide

Xindice Administrators Guide

XML:DB API Specification

XML:DB API Use Cases

XUpdate Use Cases

ICEPick Peer to Peer Personalization

Presentations:

Native XML Databases Why Bother?
(HTML) (Powerpoint)