Freitag, 26. Juli 2002

Outrageous uses for Jabber: DJ Adams. History of Jabber. An XML based messaging and presence protocol. There is a server software that implements the protocol. jabber.org server. Commercial server also available from jabber.com. Most common is the jabber.org server. The Jabber protocol is XML based. All elements are exchanged between Jabber entities. The elements are parts of a larger document. DJ explains the Jabber protocol. Interesting: The document is not sent completely. It is streamed bit by bit. Stream-closing tags can be sent a lot later - for example. The Jabber server is extensible and you can hook in your own components. DJ is having problems with his presentation which is a pity. I don't think he is going to get to outrageous uses...which is what I was expecting. Basic Jabber stuff up to now. Jabber is able to parse fragements of XML using the parsemore() function. Could Jabber be integrated with Cocoon in order to gain the asynchronous advantages? Payloads can be defined freely inside exisiting Jabber tags. Jabber can be both P2P or not. Servers can be spread around. There does not need to be one server with many clients. Similar to email (because of the store-and-forward nature).

Infrastructure - why geeks build it - why Hollywood doesn't understand it - how business can take advantage of it Doc Searls. Everyone's blooging. Sam is here, Lisa is here etc. Doc is the senior editor of linuxjournal, co-author of the cluetrain manifesto and a weblogger. Doc's adventures: Exploring the infrastructure - dial up in London - no. Found consume.net in an Internet cafe and wireless access points. Walked around London and found wireless access on someone elses network by sitting in a cafe. Met Ben Hammersly who was running the WiFi network. Doc saw that people were not using the telephone but using the WiFi. Later in the evening he meets Matt Jones (the father of warchalking). Doc put it on the blog and from there it takes over. Nature. Craig Burton: The Net is a world. "Technology starts with technologists" - Marc Andreesen. Civilization doesn't move all at the same speed. Hollywood is trying to regulate the Net. The deeper battle is between metaphers. Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other "content". Geeks see the Net as a place - a commons - where people can make culture and do business. Infrastructure is what goes under a platform. Hollywood doesn't understand infrastructure. They only understand "content" and distribution. They want to control the uncontrollable. Geeks want infrastructure to support business. Think of the Nets infrastructure as a source of natural building resources. Linux is not growing on the trees - it is the trees. The software industry is maturing into something like the construction industry. Infrastructure supports markets. Ubiquity counts and creates infrastructure. It's not infrastructure until it becomes ubiquitous. Doc shows the Burton Matrix: IBM are moving stuff over from being closed and propriatary to being open and open source. Apple is catching on and becoming masterful. They are using Jabber in iChat. Doing Rendevous, FireWire, USB etc. Now RealNetworks are getting into this game. There is a businees in getting companies to move into the open area (such as CollabNet). How do you create ubiquitous infrastructure and make money at the same time - cause anarchy then take advantage of it! Hollywood thinks commerce governs infrastructure. What kind of trouble can the restless natives make? EFF, OSI, FSF, Creative Commons, GeekPAC, AOTC. Apply the logic of anarchistic marketing. Markets are conversations!

Presentation wrap-up. About 40 people attended my presentation on the Cocoon XML Portal. 45 minutes are way too short to get into any detail, but hopefully something came across. Quite a few questions at the end on usage scenarios and comparisons to other stuff like Jetspeed. Perhaps a few will now buy the book. PS:: Someone has just come up to me in the hall and thanked S&N explicitely for supporting the Cocoon community and donating the components. That has made my day.

Time for me to get ready for my presentation. Let's hope someone comes. Cocoon attracts a lot of attention when I tell people what it can do. However Cocoon is not that well known here - perhaps I can change some of that..

Keynote: The Changing Relationship Between Business and Developers. Paul Pangaro , Elaine Coleman (both Sun Microsystems). How is open source changing the relationship of companies to their programmers? Elaine shows interviews with 3 different programmers who have a completely different view on what "programming" is. Elaine is a cognitive scientist.

Good morning from San Diego: Breakfast with Sam, Erik and Rasmus Lerdorf. Rasmus had some interesting things to say abot how the PHP project manages documentation. The PHP documentation is really organized and even each language is a separate project. Rasmus goes around getting support the documentation process and in particular by telling the user group from a country like Korea that the Japanese documentation is better. I think the secret behind the PHP documentation is that documentors have the same standing as programmers do (same email address etc.). Rasmus mentioned that in fact the German PHP users are the most professional and that PHP is used there nearly the most - when one looks at the different countries.

Out to dinner in San Diego's old town with Maddog Hall, Steve, Quenton, Greg and Christy from linuxjournal. Lots of interesting dinner conversation around open source in countries like Brazil and China, discussions about Compaq-DEC and HP-Compaq mergers (Maddog knows all the details). After a good Mexican dinner, Maddog was our guide around old town.