Monday, September 9, 2002

Jelly-ficient :-) Jelly-ficient. Wow. I grok Jelly. I mean, I get it. Cool! Our Ant build system is gone tomorrow, replaced with a Jelly one. Watch this space [rebelutionary] Yeah! :-). Using a Jelly based build system is really simple, just try using Maven which uses Jelly throughout. If you're using Maven, it might help us figure out how to build closer integration between JIRA and Maven (and blogs) :-). e.g. linking CVS audit trails with JIRA bug fixes to automatically generate release documentation for fixed bugs or new features... 3:51:47 PM    comment []

maven plugin tutorial available... Maven Plugin tutorial available. [Joe's Jelly Groovy. 1:13:16 PM    comment []

SOAP encoding of XML and binary data... codaland had a link to an article on XML.com entitled "Transporting Binary Data in SOAP", where Rich Salz says: XML is also not good at embedding XML documents inside each other... In current practice developers usually cross their fingers and make the following simplifying assumptions: Everything is in UTF-8, and nothing else from the prolog matters There are no entities or defaults Every XML ID attribute is named "id" (or perhaps "ID"), and they're not that common, so we'll ignore the potential for conflicts [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog] SOAP with Attachments allows arbitrary binary files and additional XML documents to be attached to a SOAP request. It essentially just uses MIME encoding. 1:12:03 PM    comment []

workflow thoughts Not your father's workflow. I have been mulling over some ideas involving a new workflow engine for several days. I have checked out several... [moatas] I'm interested to hear more details of what you need. bob's been working on Blissed and werkflow which will be an extensible BPML-like workflow engine that will use Jelly to provide pluggable executable XML (such as JSTL and Ant tasks) as well as drools for dynamic rules and should ultimately implement BPEL4WS and integrate cleanly with web services, SQL, XML, JMS and beans thanks to Jelly's libraries. 11:46:21 AM    comment []

Business Process Automation on J2EE Business Process Automation. Duncan Child sent me a link to Business process automation made easy with Java, Part 1. These days, severe market demands drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase shareholder value. In such an environment, businesses can realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows, eliminating nonvalue-adding human interventions, and allowing enterprise applications to communicate and intelligently and seamlessly share information. In this two-part series, we present the technology building blocks for automating an enterprise, how those blocks fit within an enterprise component architecture such as J2EE, and how you can design and build a business rule engine... [bob mcwhirter] Read the article on my way to the office today. Pretty reasonable stuff, though looking forward to the next installment when they go into much more detail. They obviously have a rule-engine bias. Shame they didn't mention drools though. The authors should definitely read up more on WSDL and BPEL4WS; they are increasingly becoming the application integration and data interchange platform they discuss in the article. Also BPEL4WS could well be the workflow definition language they talk about. 11:33:02 AM    comment []

binary XML again... Layer upon layer. Clemens Vasters, Ingo Rammer, and Brad Wilson are all debating binary XML.  [News from the Forest] I agree with Justin's comment that anything destined to last longer than a transitory message should be in XML 1.0, complete with angle brackets. I've been back and forth as to whether a binary XML format should be tied to a schema, but in the end I don't think it should, however you should be able to take the schema and produce an optimized reader if you want to. You could intern all the strings, and make the end element marker not require the element name to compact down the representation. If you're interested in reducing HTTP message sizes, and can't wait for some people to ship this, then deflate encoding is the way to go, most HTTP servers have some support for this, and the toolkit folks are starting to take advantage of it, SOAP::Lite has supported this for ages, It'll be in the next release of PocketSOAP, and I saw a patch for Apache SOAP not too long ago. [Simon Fell] In computer science we have an easy way of moving ahead. Instead of re-inventing the wheel every 30 seconds, we abstract and layer the problem and solution spaces, thus allowing re-use of solutions in new problem spaces. Sure, it may not be as efficient, but it sure is faster. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] Agreed. It seems the subject of binary XML comes around every 6 months or so. Sure a binary format would increase parsing time by a little bit but does it really matter that much? The big win of XML is interoperability. XML compresses very nicely with gzip compression, so if you're worrying about XML size, just use gzip over HTTP which as Simon says, most HTTP / SOAP engines support (or should support). 11:16:10 AM    comment []

WebWork; I don't get it (yet) WebWork rocks another world.... The power of WebWork I really love this framework. Today I hooked WebWork and Jakarta XML-RPC together to use the two as the Command dispatcher/processor for XML-RPC requests. I was able to do all this without modifying or tweeking either package. This gives me the ability to build the Commands for processing both HTTP and XML-RPC in the same bean-like fashion and configure all via an XML file. Very cool indeed. [Miceda] Dave has seen the light. The biggest problem with Webwork is the name IMHO! We use it in JIRA as a generic command pattern framework internally for a large part of our business logic. We've also done a prototype of calling WW actions directly using a Glue SOAP dispatcher. It's all very simple, flexible and 'very cool'. Now if only all those Struts users out there knew what they were missing... [rebelutionary] Unfortunately I don't quite grok whats so different about WebWork yet; I tried surfing the WebWork docs but didn't quite get it.  Maybe its just me. JSTL has an expression language and a ton of useful custom tags that seems kinda similar to some of what WebWork does. Then Struts has the front controller together with plugin Actions and Forms. Does anyone have a link for a description of what WebWork does that JSTL + Struts doesn't? Or is it just that WebWork does what JSTL + Struts do but just that it was done before JSTL was standardized? (Warning, I'm kinda biased, I was on the JSTL expert group :-). Looks like Anthony is wondering about this too. 11:01:56 AM    comment []

Thoughts on integrating Blogs to Maven Thinking out loud about Maven and Blogs I've been doing a little thinking about another approach to generating or updating site docs from Maven. Here's a couple of plugins I thought might be cool: Blogger API plugin to push project news to a weblog. User's could then subscribe to various projects and keep up to date with changes. Imagine all jakarta projects having this. An xmlStorageServer (XML-RPC) client to push project docs to the site vs. using scp. The Jakarta cloud. Maven could be the Radio of project doc. management. [Miceda] Spooky - I've been having the same kinda thoughts recently. I think open source projects should have blogs and use them (in addition to mail lists) to notify users of changes, announcements, developer notes etc.great is if open source projects had a blog. I think a bloggerAPI and xmlStorageServer plugins for Maven would be really cool :-). 9:52:28 AM    comment []