Dan Speck's Conference Blog

Testing ScribeFire

2011-02-03T13:14:00.001-05:00

I'm checking out a new Firefox plugin that I just installed called ScribeFire.

Here is an image:

Okinawa trip - June/July 2010

2010-06-28T17:31:00.000-04:00

I'm headed to Okinawa Japan for karate training tomorrow. I'm going with Donna Wieting (from my dojo in Washington) and Frank Gorman (my teacher Bob Kaiser's teacher, from Florida) and seven other people I haven't met yet. I'm hoping to update this blog daily while I'm in Okinawa but I'm not sure if our hotel/motel has wireless internet.

Dinner at Tapeo with MarkLogic

2006-12-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

Hally Ahearn, Janis Keough, and Dan Speck had dinner at Tapeo with MarkLogic on Wednesday night.

Folks from MarkLogic included:

Dave Kellogg, CEO
Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist
Jeff Hurrie, Sales
Kelly Stirman, Software Engineer/Consultant

Here are some pictures.

Here's the chair that Dave Kellogg broke while we were there:

Dave Kellogg without a chair with Kelly Stirman wondering where it went.

Hally and Jason 1.0
Janis, Beelzebub and HallyDarrren McBeath from Reed Elsevier and Steve Buxton from MarkLogic
Hally and Janis with a giant Xmas ornament.

Ubiquitous Flan

Meta-stylesheets

2006-12-07T11:13:00.000-05:00

Meta-stylesheets

Presenter: Michael Kay, Technical Director, Saxonica Limited (http://www.saxonica.com/)

Case Study 1: UI Management

Online banking application
400+ different output screens (but all look very similar)

First approach would be to use xsl:import to import common functionality into each of the 400 distinct stylesheets. This is not very good, though.

Another approach: FXSL (not available at the time). Provides functions as first-class objects. Higher-order programming.

Actual solution:

Started with a master "meta stylesheet" that contained descriptions of all individual screens and business rules.
This was processed to produce the many distinct stylesheets required for each page.

Case Study 2: Excel-to-XML conversion

Spreadsheet -> Raw XML -> Sanitized XML -> Semantic XML

Solution: A mini transformation language (XLEX)

Describes structure of the spreadsheet and the mapping to XML elements and attributes.

Case Study 3: report generator

Orbeon pipeline:

XForms processor -> XSLT transform -> XQuery (w/ XML DB) -> XSLT transform -> XHTML

Case Study 4: Schema Generator

Didn't understand this one.

Managing Content with the Atom Publishing Protocol

2006-12-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Managing Content with the Atom Publishing Protocol

Presenter: Andrew Savikas, Director, Digital Content & Publishing Services, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

O'Reilly is using Atom as the basis for their content management system.

http://labs.oreilly.com

Publishing on the fly: Client-side rendering using Saxon and FOP

2006-12-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

Publishing on the fly: Client-side rendering using Saxon and FOP

XML 2006, Wednesday, 4:15pm

Presenter: Robert Gaschen, Project Manager, AMSEC LLC

An XQuery Servlet for RESTful Data Services

2006-12-06T15:35:00.000-05:00

An XQuery Servlet for RESTful Data Services

XML 2006, Wednesday, 3:30pm

Presenter: Jonathan Robie, XQuery Technology Lead, DataDirect Technologies (http://www.datadirect.com)

Using XQuery for Data on the Web

Native support for XML
Designed for DAta Integration
XML Output is Directly Useful
Productivity of Programmers
Performance (designed to be optimized)

Exposing an XQuery as a RESTful servlet

REST = Representation State Transfer

XQuery for Java API (XQJ)

"The moral equivalent of JDBC"

Panel: Web 2.0 and XML

2006-12-06T14:06:00.000-05:00

Panel: Web 2.0 and XML

XML 2006, Wednesday, 2:15pm

Presenters:

Elliotte Harold, Adjunct Professor, Polytechnic University (http://www.cafeconleche.org/)
Simon St. Laurent, Editor, O'Reilly & Associates (http://simonstl.com)
Eric van der Vlist, CEO, DYOMEDEA (http://dyomedea.com/vdv/)
Jason Hunter, MarkLogic

What is Web 2.0?

$395 O'Reilly report on Web 2.0

Is Web 2.0 a technical thing or a business thing?

8 patterns: havesting collective intellegence, innovation and assembly, rich user experiences, software at the level of a mobile device, perpetual beta (continuous improvement), leveraging the "long tail" (what is this?), lightweight models and cost-effective scalability

Some of these are business-related and some of this is technology related.

Does XML fit into Web 2.0?

What Powers Web2.0 Mashups

2006-12-06T13:31:00.000-05:00

What Powers Web2.0 Mashups

XML 2006, Wednesday, 1:30pm

Presenter: Dan Theurer, Technical Evangelist, Yahoo! Inc. (http://theurer.cc)

Why Web Services?

http://blogginginmotion.com (contest winner at Yahoo's Hackday '06)
Enable users to consume data in their own way

Companies Yahoo has acquired in the past year:

flickr
upcoming
jumpcut
del.icio.us

What is REST(ful)?

A stateless client/server protocol:each HTTP message contains all the information necessary to understand the request. As a result, neither hte client nor the server needs to remember any communication state between messages.

Real World Mashups

Search application Rollyo (http://www.rollyo.com/)
Flikr API
Upcoming.org APIs (24 REST calls to work with) http://api.local.yahoo.com/eb/
Lots of other examples of Mashups available at http://programmableweb.com/

Authentication Web Services

BBAuth Developer Credentials Sign-up http://developer.yahoo.com/

Developer Candy

Javascript User Interface Library

A collection of JfavaScript libraries you can use in your Web development (complex UI controls, a cross-browser Ajax library, connection, event, drag-drop and more)
Update frequently
Docs available

Design Patterns on the Web

Auto-complete
breadcrumbs
drag and drop
tabs (module/navigation)
rating an object
pagination (objects/pages)
writing a review

Application Gallery

http://developer.yahoo.com

Web Publishing 2.0

2006-12-06T11:08:00.000-05:00

Web Publishing 2.0

XML 2006, Wednesday, 11:15am

Presenter: Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist, Mark Logic Corporation (http://www.marklogic.com)

This session was very well attended (standing room only). The first two keynotes of the conference were mainly about XQuery.

If we're moving toward Web 2.0, what does that mean for web publishing?

Trends:

Increasing content sizes (more public/private content, more government content)
Increasing user expectations
Standardization on XML (Web, blogs, books, articles, citations)

Major Trends

People want Answers, not Links
(O'Reilly code search)
Two ways to make more money: a) create more content, b) do more with the content you have

Custom Publishing

O'Reilly custom book site - allows you to create your own "book", say for a college class, from fragments of many books. $0.16/page.

Content in Context - research references to medicine in the conclusion sections of journal articles with the words "contraindicated", "avoid", etc.

Emphasis on Google

Fear: Owning the content, the user
Opportunity: Better search
Opportunity: Instant AdSense registration
Opportunity: Personalized landing pages

User Participation

Direct: blogging, reviewing, tagging
Direct: User-centric peer reviews (http://nature.com/nature/peerreview/)
Indirect: Search ad guidance based on collective intelligence

Agility

We're feeling our way forward
people have dreams, but aren't sure what sill work and what won't
must be agile in design, in development, and in business
The Red Queen Paradox: you must run as fast as you can just to stay in place

Case Study: Managing XML for a Global Content Delivery Platform

2006-12-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

Case Study: Managing XML for a Global Content Delivery Platform

Presenter: Marc Basch, Content Architect, LexisNexis

Global product architecture

Goals

centralize content
standardize the product
localize customer experience

XML Challenges

Scope an variety of content
Defining an XML design strategy

Fabrication - LBU converts data to XML which is loaded into common platform

Batches include XML "maniftest" file identifying batch contents (documents, image files) - wow, this sounds like a buildlist

Delivery DTDs - focus on online product delivery vs editorial creation.

Different approaches:

"Super HTML" - rejected
One core DTD that encompassed all sub-DTDs - rejected
Business-unit specific DTDs for each country/source type - rejected
just use Well-Formed files (rejected)
Create one broadly-defined delivery DTD for each content type

Proposed content types: ...

Inbound XML vs Outbound XML

Content Architecture had already been prototyped "public" and "internal" DTDs

Wednesday Keynote: Unleashing the power of XML

2006-12-06T09:05:00.000-05:00

Unleashing the power of XML

Presenter: Darin McBeath, Chief Architect, Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/)

Reed Elsevier - Reed Business, Harcourt Education, LexisNexis, Elsevier (Science & Medical)

Founded in 1880

1987-1994 LexisNexis markup was very flat and intended mainly to support fielded queries.

1994 Reed Elsevier PLC bought Mead Data Central (including LexisNexis) for $1.5BN

1996 ScienceDirect (Reed Elsevier Science Journals) - High quality SGML markup for STM publishing.

1999 XML Gateway (Engineering Village)

2001 Web Services

2002 Elsevier warehouse migrates to XML

componentized DTDs
common element pools
published DTDs (Article, Book)
packaging standard

2004 Scopus (ability to search 15000 Journals online)

J2EE
All XML

2006 All XML all the time

Biggest Challenges that XML poses for publishers:

migration of proprietary content
performance (finely tuned proprietary solutions are faster than generic XML solutions)
retraining
over/misuse
industry acceptance of XML standards
XML knowledge is confined to the technical groups

Main benefits of XML

portability
non proprietary
human readable
repurposing
standards
validation

Main weaknesses of XML

namespaces
XML Schema is overly complex
everyone can do it
external entity resolution
evolving standards
performance

XQuery is an important new technology for publishing

XQuery (and XML Databases)

No need to shred documents for storage
Agile development
No Predefined granularity
Simplicity (no need for separate database schema)
Next generation publishing platform
Content repurposing
Fabrication
Mashups

XQdocs - XQuery documentation tool

http://xqdoc.org/index.html

The Future

mind the gap
mashups (Web 2.0)
levels of intermediation
focus on markup
local distribution of content
partnerships

Panel: XML Pipeline Processing

2006-12-05T16:18:00.000-05:00

Panel: XML Pipeline Processing

XML 2006, Tuesday, 4:15pm

Panelists:

Sam Page, Senior Associate, LiquidHub, Inc. (http://www.liquidhub.com)
Norman Walsh, XML Standards Architect, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (http://www.sun.com/)

Norm Walsh

XProc: An XML Pipeline Language

The single most difficult thing to get a working group to agree on is names of things.

URLs:

What are the semantics of these pipeline descriptions?

Fun and Profit with the Google Checkout API

2006-12-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

Fun and Profit with the Google Checkout API

XML 2006, Tuesday, 3:30pm

Presenter: Patrick Chanezon, API Evangelist - Google Checkout, Google (http://wordpress.chanezon.com/)

There are lots of Google APIs (http://code.google.com)

Why did Google create Google Checkout?

63% of shopping carts are abandoned after beginning checkout
only 8% of all retail purchases are expected to occur online in 2006
cumbursome to fill out all information for each vendor

Google Checkout API

2 levels of integration:

Level 1: post shopping carts (taxes, shipping, coupons)
Level 2: merchant calculations, order management, 2-way API

Seller checkout demo: http://checkout.google.com/seller/demo.html

Panel: Word and OpenOffice for XML Authoring

2006-12-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

Panel: Word and OpenOffice for XML Authoring

Presenters:

Jon Parsons, Director Product Marketing, XyEnterprise
Mark Jacobson, Senior Analyst, Really Strategies Inc. (http://www.reallysi.com/)
Clyde Hatter, VP, Legislative and Regulatory Solutions, Propylon (http://www.propylon.com)

Parsons

Blah, blah, blah...

Jacobson

No support for XML in Word 97 or 2000.

Beginning with Word2003 there was some XML support. Save as WordML. Use custom schemas.

Using Word for XML editing, most applications allow for saving invalid XML. Cleaned up in "real" XML editor (e.g., Arbortext or Stylus Studio) later.

Word2007 uses XML (WordML) as its native format (saved in this format by default).

Hatter

OpenOffice for XML Authoring

Using OpenOffice to produce legislative documents in the Irish parliament since 2004.
Complex DTD for representing legislation.
OpenOffice IS an XML editor (it just has a fixed DTD).

Format: .zip file containing style + content info.
API:
http://api.openoffice.org/

What is JEdit?

Language Support for Web Service Development

2006-12-05T13:31:00.000-05:00

Language Support for Web Service Development

Presenter: Igor Peshansky

XML 2006, Tuesday, 1:30pm

Supports:

Schema importation
Inline XML construction
Compilation to Java bytecode
Inline Xpath expressions
Web services (WSDL) import

xjc - XML javac

Demos

Amazon Client

Amazon Server

Gmail + Amazon mashup

web site is: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xj

PHP and XML: Reusing Other People's Information On Your Website

2006-12-05T11:15:00.000-05:00

Presenter: Robin Hastings, Web Design and Training Coordinator, Missouri River Regional Library

Tuesday, 11:15am

http://magpierss.sourceforge.net

Hmmm. This presentation wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be. Not sure why I thought that in the first place, now that I think about it.

XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language

2006-12-05T10:27:00.000-05:00

Presentation:

XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language

Presenter: Daniela Florescu, Senior Consultant, Oracle Corporation

XML 2006 Tues. 10:30

XQuery semantics were carefully specified to side-effect free

AND and OR are distributable
order of evaluation is irrelevant

New additions to XQuery for updates: insert, delete, rename, etc.

These are not fully-composable with the rest of the language.

XQueryP Overview

- A small language extension
- Supported by Oracle, BEA, DataDirect, etc.
- Proposed to W3C
- Details:

* A well-defined evaluation order for XQuery expressions ("sequential order") [this is a big change!!!]
* adds new expressions: block, set, while, break, continue

* error handling (try/catch)

* added a way to model graphs in XML
* a way of mapping XQueryp <-> Web services (optional)

New Expression Types:

Block Expressions

{ block-decl;... expr;... }

Assignment expressions

set $varName := exprSingle

Functions and blocks

declare updating function local:prune($d as xs:integer) as xs:integer {
declare $count as xs:inteer := 0;
for $m in /mail/message[date lt $d]
return { do delete $m;
set $count :- $count + 1
};
$count;
};

While

while ( condition ) {
expr;...
break;
continue;
}

XML 2006 Opening Keynote (9:00am)

2006-12-05T09:16:00.000-05:00

Xquery(P) - new scripting language for XQuery?

XQuery Enagled Browser (UI) - what does this mean?

XQuery enabled enterprise database -- Application Logic and Data

XQuery language status

Proposed Recommendation - Nov. 2006

XQueryP (the scripting extension) is designed and proposed
-side effects
- variable assignents

The FLWOR Foundation - founded by the guy that gave the keynote.

Oracle XML Application Platform (XAP)

ZORBA - free OpenSource XQuery engine

Welcome to my blog

2005-05-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

Okay, so now I have my very own blog. I wonder what I'll use it for.