Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Windley's Enterprise Computing on Earthviewer 3d: If you like maps, even a little, you'll love this program. The program uses Keyhole satellite data to give you a view or anywhere on earth. The software allows you to fly over the landscape. Type in an address and you "fly" there in seconds. I had fun going from where I grew up in Idaho to my brother's house in Virginia. If the target point is in a metro zone, you can see things with 1m resolution. I've known about Earthviewer for a while, and I was completely blown away by it. My friends were amazed when I showed them, too. I absolutely love EV3D, but since I'm a student, I can't afford the expensive license. It's a shame, too, because Keyhole could make so much money charging $50 or so for a single metropolitan area worth of 1m resolution to the home user. 10:38:21 PM    comment []

Ulrich Mayring on Cocoon in the Corporation: Have you ever wondered why PHP and similar technologies are so successful in the market? They are easy to install (mostly come pre-installed with Apache anyway), easy to configure, easy to use. They are fast, stable and secure enough for webhosting. Nowadays almost every serious webhoster offers something like PHP or Perl - but who offers Cocoon? Sure, the industry sees the value of XML-based processing, but they don't adopt Cocoon, they are either building their own thing (Roxen) or extending their existing technology (Perl). Nowadays it's hard to find a content management system that does not loudly proclaim to support XML. It won't be long before almost every CMS will be able to do XML-based processing and to publish dynamically on the Web. None of the CMSes that I know use Cocoon for that, instead they're all developing their own thing. So, at one point in the future Cocoon will lose its advantage that it has no competition. And if it loses that, it won't be the best thing since sliced bread anymore. I've tried to win people over to the Cocoon1 platform, when it still was current. Many of them, however, said that it was too hard to use. They'd rather wait for their existing technology to support XML. When I told them that their existing technology will only ever support XML as an afterthought, while Cocoon1 is built from the ground up to work with XML, they said: "that's as maybe, it may not be elegant, but we can leverage our existing knowledge and the less time we need to port our apps over, the greater the return on investment." 4:42:32 PM    comment []

Cocoon Documentation Wiki. Get at it! 3:46:32 PM    comment []