mercredi 16 juillet 2003

REST: Yeh, Baby! I'm a RESTian, and I'm proud of it. REST is the simple idea that the web already had an architecture, one which was broken by xml-rpc and SOAP. (I guess that makes me one of the " people who don't like personal computers to try to stop progress in building GUI software that ran over the Internet", according to Dave in an eWeek article.) Gee, I don't even know anything but personal computers. Fredrik, who is also this year's winner of the Frank Willison award, wrote up a nice piece on his view of REST. Fredrik also has a nice little article on Infosets. News flash: the web has an architecture, and it isn't based on SQL or remote procedures. Even a nimrod like me can figure that out. 7:19:42 PM   comment []

My Recent Projects I've been a bit quiet lately. Foremost, I slowed down on the travel schedule. Second, I'm doing some actual, real stuff for the ZEA sponsors. :^) I wrapped up a rather large next installment for my ZopeMag series on Zope 3 For Web Designers. (Basically, writing UIs with skins.) These recent issues of ZopeMag are full of really interesting articles. I'm also doing an advanced UI for a BlueDynamics project. The customer has a deep tree of data that they need to move around in very quickly, visualize in rich ways, and make changes. I did a prototype that used XML, XSLT, XPath, and JavaScript to retrieve all the project data, then paint a picture on the screen. Every time you move or make a change, you're not going to the server, you're staying local. The UI is a slight combination of OS X's multi-column Finder interface, along with a tree. The customer was happy with the first two milestones. Now we start the fun stuff. Finally, I've been playing with some ideas related to organizing the information contained in the world of Zope. So far, just a couple of mockups and a lot of notes. I'm also working on ZEA v2. Alpha 1. Stay tuned for more. 10:48:56 AM   comment []

The Mozilla Foundation From Jon Udell's weblog: Mozillla Gets a Foundation. It's interesting to compare Mozilla's relationship with its original owner, to Zope's relationship with its original owner. ZC produced a better end result with the move, over the years, of Zope into the community, although some bottlenecks remain. (Release management remains a challenge.) Good luck to Mitchell and the others. I agree with Jon's hunch and I'm bullish on the impact this move will have. Sure, Mozilla will now find out whether it can still accelerate when the original parent's business objectives change and the core team is, erm, transitioned. However, if Mozilla is really of value (which it is), then it will find the support and thrive. Not a breakdown, rather a breakthrough. 10:40:59 AM   comment []

OSCOM Videos Bob Doyle and his team have wrapped up quite a few of the professional-quality videos from OSCOM 3 in Harvard. One of these is from the video (RealMedia, streaming) from the Building a CMS Client In Mozilla workshop I gave with Stephan Richter. We had to cover around 40 people, working on their laptops, to build a working CMS frontend (to Apache/mod_dav and Zope) in 3 hours. We finished in 3 hours...and five minutes. :^) 10:28:11 AM   comment []

Melbourne Sprint Photos Jan Smith wrote to say that OzZope wrapped up last week's sprint hosted by Trinity College's IT department. Jim Fulton was the coach, thus getting closer to hitting every continent in 12 months. Thanks, Jan, for the nice recap. 10:22:17 AM   comment []