The promotional material for Office 2003 gushes about all the new, glitzy ways to “share” while you work. But there’s an ominous undercurrent, evident in the progression of the topic headings on the Reasons to upgrade page:

• Collaborating
• Exchanging
• Organizing
• Managing
• Controlling
• Preventing

Office itself is a black box. There’s no sharing or exchanging or collaborating. Only managing, controlling, and preventing. They understand how valuable most people think true collaboration is, which is why it’s the first item on that list. But you don’t get to collaborate on the next release of Excel, or contribute a better indexing tool for Word. It’s an illusion of community that masks a reality of rigid control.
And that impulse to impose keeps poking through. You can now share your Word documents in exciting new ways … like restricting others from editing them.
Of course, when it comes to providing actual security, as with the “Password Protection” feature for VBA projects — a feature used by thousands of developers and by companies like Adobe for their Office Add-Ins — you’d think Microsoft would know all about how to keep source code secure.
“If you lose or forget the password, there is no way to view the locked VBA project.”
But their cryptography is so bad that all it takes to see “protected” VBA code is a (free) copy of OpenOffice. Then again, Microsoft knows that true security doesn’t come from encryption, it comes from litigation.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually like Office. I use Word every day, and more often than not, it’s a positive experience. But then I take a glance over at CPAN, and I’m reminded what collaborating and exchanging are really about.
The Microsoft “office” isn’t a bad place to work. Just don’t forget who keeps the keys.

Java Business Integration, a.k.a. JSR-208
to be featured at JavaOne this coming week.

I’m really excited that JBI (JSR-208)
will be getting some air time at JavaOne this week.  We on the expert group have
been working hard at it for the past year.  I’m very happy with the progress
that’s being made.  We plan to have a draft spec available in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, there are 4 talks on
JBI that are happening this week (listed shortly).  But first, here are some high level points to describe JBI
–

• The Java Business Integration (JBI) initiative (a.k.a.
  JSR-208) is an effort within the Java Community Process to define a
  specification describing the way that integration components can be
  plugged together as services in a vendor-neutral and portable fashion. 

• JBI will do for integration and the ESB what EJB did for
  application logic and the app server.

• JBI provides a standard way for integration components to
  plug together as services in a loosely-coupled manner using standard
  interfaces and protocol independence.  JBI uses WSDL to describe its
  integration components as services, and the XML data model to describe normalized
  messages that get passed between services.

• The adoption of JBI will help to foster and accelerate an
  ecosystem around pluggable, interoperable integration components. This
  will allow further industry momentum to build around a model of
  third-party services that can easily plug into an ESB environment.

JBI Sessions at JavaOne 2004

There are 4 sessions at this year’s JavaOne that are JBI related –

JBI Sessions:

- Gordon Van Huizen (Sonic CTO):  JBI
Vendor panel: JavaTM Business Integration: JSR 208 (Session ID: TS-1056)  -
Monday 2:15 PM   North Meeting Room 121/122/124/125

-  Nick Kassem (Sun Spec lead): JavaTM Business Integration
(JSR 208) (Session ID: TS-2725) Tuesday 2:45 PM   Hall E #134

- Dave Chappell (Sonic CTE): Distributed
Integration in the Real World: JavaTM Business Integration and the Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB) (Session ID: TS-2664)  Wednesday 2:45 PM   Hall E #134

- Sun presenters from marketing and engineering: JSR 208:JavaTM
Business Integration, The Enterprise View (Session ID: TS-2455)  Thursday 3:45 PM   Hall E #134

NOTE: Attendees who attend my Wed afternoon session, stay
till the end, and fill out a form will receive a complementary copy of my new ESB
book on-site.

Members
of the JSR-208 Expert Group –

Members of the JBI Expert Group include BEA, Borland, CGE&Y, Collaxa, IBM,
IOPSIS, Intalio, Nokia, Novell, Oak Grove Systems, Oracle, RIM, SAP, SeeBeyond,
Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems,  Sybase,  TIBCO, Tmax,  Vignette,  and
WebMethods.

Hope to see you at the show!

Dave

Related link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/06/16/dive.html

RSS and Atom are all about providing metadata to help someone or something decide whether to follow a particular link. The Atom effort is making an admirable effort to include link typing with a taxonomy based on HTML a/@rel values. This re-use, like much software re-use, has led to the use of something, just because it was available and part of the set being re-used, that doesn’t fit well where it’s being applied (the use of the term “alternate” to indicate a primary resource) but sensible people seem to have noticed this. Other HTML a/@rel values work as well in Atom as they were supposed to in (X)HTML.

Mark Pilgrim’s XML.com article explains the use of Atom’s link/@rel attribute, and I’ve added a comment underneath the article. I must admit, I haven’t followed the Atom work very closely, so I’d be happy to hear any clarifications about this.

Related link: http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

I must admit, I’m not sure what to think of these folks. On the one hand, I think we’ve sacrificed a lot of privacy in the name of progress, and I think Database Nation should be required reading. Skepticism is certainly a virtue, and if the once superb, now defunct magazine that used Napoleon’s words as their motto, Brill’s Content, were still around, I’m sure they’d be a bit skeptical of Google as well.

But on the other hand, I love Google, and I appreciate how they’ve managed to consistently maintain quality (and apparently obscene profitability) without resorting to the kind of shenanigans François Joseph de Kermadec came across.

For now, I’d rather see some serious skepticism pointed toward something I find a lot creepier than Google.

Is Google creepy?

Related link: http://www.htdig.org/dev/htdig-3.2/RELEASE.html

First release in 7 months of this powerful free software
system for indexing and searching contents of a Web site or intranet site.

The release includes a bunch of bugs, along with a few enhancements. This is a release from the 3.2 “beta” branch of the project, but the release announcements says, “we consider it stable enough for most production use.” And in my experience using previous releases from the branch, it is very stable — I’ve never run into any significant problems with it.

If you find yourself wanting or needing to set up a search engine for content on your Web site or intranet site, and you’ve not yet taken a look at ht://Dig, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. The project Web site has a list of some of the features it provides. (That list isn’t up to date, though. It doesn’t mention, for example, that it’s possible to index PDF content or MS Word files with 3.2.x versions of ht://Dig. And there are some other significant features that aren’t listed there.)

Related stuff

• Setting up ht://Dig on Mandrake 9 (blog from Uche Ogbuji

Related link: http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/

The Extreme Markup Languages conference is getting ready to take off, with tutorials and the first part of the schedule posted and late-breaking papers due next Friday.

I’ve never found a conference quite like this one. It’s small and intense, but while it’s about computers, certainly, it’s not exactly about programming. It has a deep collection of prior conversations, but it’s approachable to anyone who can stand to think really hard about presentations and discussions for hours on end.

Extreme let me rant with Playmobil last year, but one of the things I’ve enjoyed is how themes emerge across presentations even when it wasn’t obvious from their titles. The interactions between tree structures (XML, for instance) and graph structures (RDF, databases, objects) was a constant theme last year, highlighting problems yet to be solved and techniques that might help address them.

Extreme definitely lives up to its name. If you care about data, Extreme is a great place to spend the first week in August. (Even if you’re not an “XML person”, you’ll get to think a lot!) It doesn’t hurt that it’s in Montreal, either!

At least in Europe, data rates for GPRS connectivity are
expensive. Especially if you’re paying out of your own pocket!
The costs of even a brief web browsing session on a smartphone can soon
pile up.
A possible solution to this has just been
announced by Opera, in the form of their
Mobile Accelerator.

Mobile Accelerator is a subscription service where you pay for access to
their HTTP proxy. The proxy is smart, and optimizes web content for smartphone
connections in order to reduce bandwidth requirements.

Opera’s promotional material says that Mobile Accelerator is “aimed at significantly increasing your browsing speed on mobile devices while also reducing your data traffic costs” and that it “reduces the size of Web pages by approximately 50-70%, but it has the ability to reduce them up to 90%.”

I decided to take the Accelerator for a spin on my Sony Ericsson
P800 phone, running the Opera 6.31 browser. Setting the proxy up was simply
a case of entering the URL of an auto-configuration page. Thereafter
I browsed as normal.

The speed-up you get will depend on the content you read and how much Accelerator can optimize it.
To see if Accelerator lived up to its claims, I performed some experiments.
I tried three different sites: my own weblog, BBC News and O’Reilly Network.
The latter has adverts on it, which introduces some unknowns into my measurements.

I tested the amount of kilobytes my phone had to send and receive over GPRS in order to load each page. I am charged by total data transfer, so the sum of these is the key figure. I didn’t test download times, as there were too many variables involved to get an objective measure.

Here are the download results.

Note that the cache was cleaned and Opera restarted before every load.

So it looks like I’m getting savings in bandwidth between around 20% and
70%. At the top end, this is definitely consistent with Opera’s claim of 70%.
At the lower end, however, it looks like Opera’s 50% figure is a little
optimistic.

The savings afforded by the Accelerator definitely improve when used in
conjunction with your browser’s cache. I performed the experiment again for my weblog, but without cleaning the cache:

Of course, when browsing on my P800, I don’t always start either with
no cache, or a full cache. Neither do I always have image loading on, as
I did for this test. It certainly is the case that I save bandwidth by
using Accelerator, whatever the conditions.

I did notice that there was some visual change to pages from going
through the proxy. For some sites, the body font appeared to get larger
when using Accelerator, and some whitespace opened up between table elements.
However, I saw nothing that seriously limited the readability of a page.
In fact, using Accelerator rendered one page readable where previously the
text had been squeezed into a 20 pixel wide column.

For my normal browsing use, this visual alteration is irrelevant however,
as I use Opera’s “Fit to screen” mode, which does an excellent
job of rearranging a page’s content to fit well into the P800’s available
width.

So, crunch point. Will Mobile Accelerator pay for itself? I often use a
lot of GPRS data, but more often through fetching my email over a Bluetooth
link to my laptop. Accelerator only works with web content, obviously, so how
much do I need to browse to make a saving? Opera are offering the service at 3
Euros per month. Given that I might expect to get around 50% data saving, this
means the break-even point is 6 or more Euros worth of GPRS in web browsing.

Given my current Vodafone price plan, 6 Euros will buy me just over 0.5MB of
access. It seems like Opera Accelerator would be a sensible purchase.
Hopefully in the long term it will drive down data prices, as network operators
realise people are paying Opera money in order to pay less to the
operators!

Does this product make sense to you?
Are there any open source alternatives?

Related link: http://press.nokia.com/PR/200406/948862_5.html

Nokia has just published the first press release on the Second Edition rev of their popular Series 60 platform, used in phones from Nokia, Panasonic, Siemens Mobile, Samsung, Sendo and LG. Among a flurry of new features, the Series 60 SE platform has a new UI framework, featuring SVG support:

“The scalable UI framework is designed to encourage enhanced application innovation; to drive the differentiation of Series 60 based devices and to increase the usage of data services. For enhanced user experience Series 60 sets a new benchmark by bringing high display resolutions by 208×208, 240×320 QVGA and 352×416 in both portrait and landscape orientations. The UI framework will include the support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that will enable third party developers to design layout aware applications that can intuitively adjust to the different resolutions.”

It is not quite clear from that quote what level of SVG support we can expect from Series 60 SE, although SVG Tiny 1.1 would obviously be a nice fit. Given Nokia and Sun’s joint leadership in bringing SVG APIs to the J2ME platform, and the developer orientation of Series 60, maybe we can expect support for the JSR 226 APIs.

This is yet another win for SVG in the mobile industry, following announcements from Siemens Mobile and Sony-Ericsson that they will be shipping SVG Tiny-enabled phones during 2004. Vodafone, the biggest carrier worldwide, also announced SVG-based services in Q4 2004 and their new Vodafone live! release.

What do you think you’ll be using mobile SVG for?

Related link: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/languageposter_0504.html

A while back I came across Éric Lévénez’s Unix History page after reading mention (in a brian d foy blog) of a nifty Unix Timeline chart there. Now I see that, based on another chart at Lévénez’s site, his Computer Languages Timeline, O’Reilly has now put together a slick-looking History of Programming Languages poster, along with a related wiki.

But note that like the also-very-cool Anatomy of a Linux System poster that O’Reilly put out a few years back, hard copies of this poster aren’t for sale. If you want to get your hands on a copy, it looks like your only choice (other than printing it out at your own expense) is either to pick one up at an O’Reilly conference or to ask for one when you order two or more books through the O’Reilly bookstore.

Related link: http://www.cafeconleche.org/#news2004June10

Elliotte Rusty Harold has announced the first alpha release of XOM, a tree-based API for processing XML with Java. He has described it as “closest in spirit to JDOM” and representing an “effort to synthesize the best features of the existing APIs while eliminating the worst”.

He writes: “the API is now considered to be complete and frozen. Code you write to XOM today should not require recompilation against any future 1.x release”. The changes in the release include bug fixes and performance improvements, the addition of support for the XInclude second candidate recommendation, and “some modifications to base URI handling to more consistently provide absolute URIs”.

In a slide from a related What’s Wrong with XML APIs (and how
to fix them) presentation, Harold lists some
high-level design principles that guided him in
development of XOM:

He says that he took a “Less is more” (”easy
to learn, easy to use, fast enough, and small
enough”) approach to XOM, that, for example,
“deliberately eschews the many convenience
methods that make the JDOM API so cluttered”. He
details some of the other differences between XOM
and JDOM in another slide from the presentation and
in the first section of his XOM FAQ
(which includes a list of XOM features that have
no equivalent in JDOM).

Related stuff:

• The Future of JDOM for processing XML using Java (blog from Kevin Bedell).

Related link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/06/09/deviant.html

Don’t get me wrong. I adore the ideals of the Semantic Web. But I also share Cory Doctorow’s well articulated trepidation about anything that’s predicated on humans being honest and reliable on the scale required by the Semantic Web.
It’s not that I distrust people. I just know that people are, well, people.

Can the Semantic Web overcome human nature?

Related link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/officexml/

One of the finest features of Adobe FrameMaker (long a favorite among tech publishers) is the MIF file format (MIF stands for Maker Interchange Format).

MIF is a lossless, ASCII representation of a FrameMaker file, and it’s well document and easily parsed. Things that would be impossible or nearly so from the Frame UI are a walk in the park from MIF.

Though RTF can occasionally serve as a nearly lossless ASCII format for Word files, it’s rather abstruse, and notoriously difficult to parse.

But with Word 2003, Microsoft has finally opened up their books, so to speak, providing a truly lossless ASCII file format that even bests MIF, by being XML. WordprocessingML is cumbersome, to say the least, but Word documents are complicated, cumbersome things, that need a lot of description. And while WordprocessingML won’t ever be anyone’s (except Redmond’s) idea of a standard document format, it opens the floodgates for those of us who traffic in Word files.

For example, as I was reading through the excellent Office 2003 XML, I noticed a 7-line XSL stylesheet that removes all direct (not style-based) formatting from a Word document. Seven lines. No macros. No need even to open up Word. That’s (finally) true batch processing in Word. For what I do, this is a much bigger deal than the Task Pane.

Though much of the attention paid toward the XML features in Word XML has been about data exchange beteween Word and the rest of the world, I for one am more excited about what I can do to (and with) Word XML without ever leaving Office.

Related link: http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/

The Web-based “Release Planner” interface that I use at my company for editing and viewing data (bug lists, schedules, etc.) for releases of our software lacks one important feature: It can’t display Gantt charts of project schedules. So, a while back I went hunting for something I might be able to use to build an app to generate Gantt charts from the data in our release-planning database. After hitting a number of dead-ends, I came across JpGraph and realized right away that it was exactly what I needed.

JpGraph is an PHP-based object-oriented library you can use to generate a variety of graphs/charts: pie charts, bar graphs, polar plots, line plots, error plots, scatter plots, field plots, box/stock/candle charts, radar graphs, … and Gantt charts. There are some thumbnail examples of various JpGraph-generated images at the JpGraph website. Below is an example of a JpGraph-generated Gantt chart.

JpGraph has a great set of features, is well documented (comes with a how-to guide that runs to about 150 pages), and the source code is clean and easy to work with if you need to make modifications to it. It’s a nice piece of work all around.

Related link: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook/2004-06/msg00008.html

Changes since version 4.3 include new package and biblioref elements and a fix for a bug in the catalog files distributed in the 4.3 release.

You can download the 4.4 beta release in a variety of formats:

• >RELAX NG
• >DTD
• >W3C XML Schema

Get the RELAX NG version and give it try with James Clark’s nXML mode for GNU Emacs.

Version 4.4 may well be the final 4.x release. The next left-of-dot version, DocBook 5, will be RELAX NG-based and will probably be a sort of evolutionary refactoring of DocBook. For Norm Walsh’s thoughts about just what kind of refactoring it might be, see the DocBook Evolution thread at Norm’s weblog.

Norm has been developing a prototype “next generation” version of DocBook, DocBook NG. The latest version of that is the Cachaça release (but you can still get the previous Bourbon and Absinthe releases if you want).

Related link: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2726

“Senders may not be able to track opens and click rates properly. And, Gmail could deliver a body blow to viral marketing, not to mention disappearing permission mailers’ messages without a trace in the spam folder.”

Hmmm. Forgive me for not getting why this is a bad thing.

Related link: http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/05/25/degunkwindows.html

Though it’s geared to XP users, “Degunking Windows” also brought my wife’s Windows Me machine back from near-death to near-full-speed.

And I was quite intrigued to read this interview with one of the book’s coauthors, Jeff Duntemann. I wouldn’t have expected the same author behind a consumer-oriented Windows book, and a
book on Assembler.

Got any Degunking tips of your own?

I freed my parent’s attic of the old Franklin Ace 1000 I’d used from seventh grade through high school, hoping to get it going and play with some projects - in assembler - that seemed too difficult then. Now if only I could get it to boot into DOS…

I can’t tell whether the disk drives have gone bad - I have two - or if all the disks have demagnetized. The only disk that’s actually booted is an ancient A2-FS1 flight simulator, a Sopwith Camel done as lines. The one ProDOS disk I have comes up far enough to tell me that ProDOS can’t be loaded - Apple started checking ROMs to avoid supporting us Franklin owners. I remember that there’s a way to edit disks and add three no-ops, but as my disk editor isn’t running either, that’s not too helpful. Most disks produce the ‘error’ jamming noise, though some just spin. A few start to boot, and then crash to the monitor prompt.

The computer itself seems fine. If I hit the lovely red reset button, I get an AppleSoft prompt, and I can get into the monitor just fine. I just can’t save any programs to disk, which is kind of a nuisance for the explorations I was hoping to undertake. (I was hoping to get back to Ultima IV, too.)

I guess I can try some emulators, though I doubt Apple will consider my three Macintosh purchases (SE/840AV/iMac) sufficient expiation for my Franklin Ace 1000 and happily/legally let me use their ROM images. Given the situation of my disks, maybe I need to find an old Apple anyway, and its possession would make those issues go away.

I guess it was a good idea to print out listings of all the great games I wrote back in seventh grade!

Any thoughts on booting a recalcitrant Franklin Ace 1000?

A while back, I wrote about the changing face of XML, and said that XML and relational databases appeared to be a slow starter. XML database guru Ron Bourret wrote back with a different perspective.

Here’s what he has to say:

I’ve been off wandering about the Web tonight and ran across the following
statement on your blog:

“Databases. Though there’s a reasonable amount of interest in the W3C XML Query language, there’s not much to say about XML and
databases. It doesn’t seem to me that the integration of XML with
relational databases has taken off in the way we once thought it
might.”

I will admit to just a wee bit of bias here, but I’m not sure I’d translate a
lack of conference presentations to the integration of XML and relational
databases not taking off. The use of Web services has certainly taken off, and
I’d venture to say that behind almost every Web service is a relational database
generating or receiving data in XML form.

On the other hand, the lack of conference papers seems indicative of
what’s going on in the XML database industry:

1) The basic mappings between XML and relational databases are around five years
old and haven’t changed much in that time. Hence, there’s not a lot to talk
about at conferences, at least in terms of cutting edge stuff.

2) SQL/XML is somewhat new and Jim Melton seems to be a fixture at most
conferences, but he’s just one guy and doesn’t translate into more than one
talk. Although it is supported by DB2 and Oracle, SQL/XML suffers from a less
than wonderful surface syntax. I have no idea how widely it is used — the Web
is almost devoid of information about it — but if I was using DB2 or Oracle and
needed to publish my data as XML, I’d use SQL/XML. There aren’t really any other
competitors with the same degree of flexibility.

3) XQuery over relational databases hasn’t taken off like I thought it would.
IBM came out with an alphaWorks product a year or two ago, but it doesn’t appear
to have gone anywhere since. There are also a number of integration products
that do this and new ones seem to be showing up slowly but steadily, but the
authors don’t seem to do conference presentations. From a conference point of
view, XQuery-over-relational seems to be one slide in an XQuery presentation.

4) The big relational databases do seem to have some exciting things in the
works, but what they’re doing is mostly implementation of existing ideas (e.g.
XQuery, SQL/XML) rather than pushing any new boundaries.

Yukon (SQL Server) is due out in 2005 and claims to have native XML
support — that is, the XML data type is supported by what appears to be a
native XML database built into the relational database. If this is true, it’s
significant. They also have an XQuery implementation and can query relational
data from XQuery as well as embedding XQuery queries in SQL. Good stuff.

Oracle 9i release 2 was the first out with “native” XML support, but their
“native” XML support means storing the XML in a CLOB column or mapping it to
relational columns with an object-relational mapping, with XPath supported over
both types of storage. The CLOB support is is cute, but it won’t scale without
heavy indexing. Oracle has an XQuery prototype with extensions for SQL queries
inside XQuery. It appears that this works over both the aforementioned storage
types, but I’m not really sure. If they add true native storage, this will be a
good product.

DB2 currently has SQL/XML support and they had the first XQuery-over-relational
implementation, although only on alphaWorks. They haven’t said much publicly
about where they are going with XML support, but given the amount of work going
on in their labs, one assumes some of it will eventually make it into DB2.

Sybase, Informix, Access, and FoxPro have XML support as well, but I haven’t
tracked these closely enough to know where they’re going in the future. (Oddly
enough, Sybase provides native XML storage, but not much in the way of XML
support for existing data.) One of the great mysteries to me is why PostgreSQL
and MySQL essentially don’t have XML support. They’ve got some toy stuff, but
nothing serious. Maybe Open Source middleware is filling the need?

My guess is that everything will pick up on this front in a year or two, with
companies moving towards what I consider the holy grail of XML support in
relational databases: native storage behind a first-class XML data type, XQuery
support with extensions for (a) including relational data or SQL queries and (b)
updates, SQL/XML support with extensions for embedded XQuery queries, and
support for JSR 225 (see below).

Of course, this still won’t translate into lots of conference talks, as only a
few companies are involved.

5) IBM and Oracle are leading work on a Java API for XQuery (JSR 225), but this
isn’t strictly for use with relational databases. Still, it should start showing
up at conferences at some point in the near future.

6) Native XML databases commonly include the ability to integrate data from
relational databases. (There are a number of XQuery-based integration engines
that work with relational and other types of data as well.) You can find a
number of these companies on the trade-show floor at conferences but, except for
Mike Champion from Software AG, few of them seem to do presentations.

I beat up the native XML database companies on this every chance I get, but I
haven’t seemed to make much headway. Not sure if this is lack of budget –
except for Software AG and Sonic (eXcelon), these companies tend to be small –
or just that they’re making the mistake of a lot of technology firms that
technology trumps marketing. (Which, of course, explains the failure of
Microsoft in the marketplace ;) That said, the number of presentations by these
companies at conferences has gone from zero a few years ago to a few now.

Do you use XML support in databases? What’s your opinion on the state of the technology?