Warning: x = x + 1 May Be Hazardous to Your Brain Many people that are just starting in their software career have not been exposed to the contrast between two very different approaches to solving server side scalability issues. And although efficiently using 100 CPUs is not critical today, in the next five years it will become critical for a projects success. In this article we look at how the cognitive styles of functional and imperative software will shape the computing industry.… read more Dan McCreary

Schemas: stereotypes, archetypes or prototypes? The problem with schemas is this: sometimes we need prototypes, sometimes we need archetypes, sometimes we need stereotypes, but transitioning between them is not trivial in any schema language, which may be optimised for particular cases.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Open Comparability: against anti-benchmarking EULAs It is time that legislators, regulators and procurement officials put an end to end-user license agreements (EULA) that prevent publication of comparative benchmarks.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Validating Code Lists with Schematron How happy the man whose documents are clearly divided into variant and invariant: data versus schemas. But in the real world, often there are data values or structures which have fixed choices, but not completely fixed: a twilight zone. Here is a summary of various ways of validating lists using Schematron, including how to validate data values that are drawn from multiple external glossaries.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Five RESTful Friends Sometimes in computing, as in life, we are surrounded by friends that are standing by to help us. But unless we are aware our friends exist and we give them the information they need to help us, we will not be able to take advantage of their services. Here is a brief overview of five friends you may not be aware of that are standing by to help you with your web application performance.… read more Dan McCreary

Creating Bullet Bars with Google Charts Using Google Charts REST interface it's easy to create bullet bar dashboard indicators without using excessive screen area.… read more Dan McCreary

Content Routing in XRX Does your database management system implement the content routing pattern? How would your applications be different if content routing were "baked in" to each database server? Would a rules-based approach to object-persistence make your systems more flexible?… read more Dan McCreary

SIL's Graphite and Wen Quan Yi SIL has just released a fork of Open Office 3.0 with Graphite integrated: Graphite is their leading-edge rendering system for non-Latin complex scripts. And Qianqian Fang's Wen Quan Yi (Spring of Letters) project is making screen fonts for all Han Ideographic characters in Unicode.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Fake real-time blog from Document Interoperability Initiative 2 at Redmond Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?… read more Rick Jelliffe

What are Chinese Tables? Here is a very messy and repellent diagram. (If I remember, it was an old Taiwanese table assigning bopomofo letters to buses or trains for particular routes.) But rather than sneer, we should ask ourselves what graphical/writing problem is this layout solving?.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Current CSS & formatting specs and drafts at W3C Here is a quick list of the current CSS specs and drafts from W3C.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Editors Choice Award for "Green IT Architect"; A TechTarget writeup on our talk at OpenWorld Back on Earth Day 2008 I blogged about how Verizon Wireless is "Going Green" with SOA and EDA, and measuring the resulting ROI by reduction in tonnage of hardware in the datacenter. Reduction of hardware means less power consumption from...… read more David A. Chappell

Can XML Help you Avoid a Disruptive Innovation? This semester, I'm fortunate to spend my Wednesday nights teaching management to students who are part of NYU's M.S. in publishing program. Although a significant share of the course is...… read more Brian O'Leary

Trying to figure out where Open Formula fits in OpenFormula actually defines an exchange formula language which has explicit delimiters, but also allows (and partly defines) application-specific user interface languages, which allows spaces and other delimiters. An ODF spreadsheet that used IS29500 syntax when saved, even if it didn't follow full Open Formula, would not be conforming.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? I suggest that perhaps the looming challenge for document standards is not in deciding or developing perfect formats, but in integrating the packaged world of documents with the fragmented world of web resources. ...First, a potted history of the document format landscape over last 25 years...… read more Rick Jelliffe

OSCON for FREE! I am offering a novel idea about Open Source. Ric Johnson

Grouping in XQuery One of the really convenient features introduced in XSLT 2.0 is Grouping. It is a typical second-generation change in a programming language: Not essential for the language itself (grouping can be done by hand using techniques such as the Muenchian… read more Erik Wilde

XML makes you stoopid! Everyone is missing the forest for the trees on Google Protcol Buffers not using XML. Ric Johnson

Google hates XML Goolge does not know how to use XML - in fact it seems the HATE it. Ric Johnson

Why M. David Peterson is WRONG The truth in blogging: follow the money to know where your favorite posting really are saying. Ric Johnson

Microsoft credible as blushing debutante at the standards ball? Effective participation in standards bodies involves quite specific commitment and development of expertise, it is not a generic capability that can be instantly redeployed, Rumsfield-style, to trouble spots. For example, while knowledge of OASIS procedures may help you understand some… read more Rick Jelliffe

Using SwiXML and Substance 5 SwiXML is Wolf Paulus' XML User Interface languge (XUI or XUL) which uses the regularity of the Java Swing GUI libraries to allow very lightweight implementation: XML elements are used for JComponents, XML attributes are used for properties (e.g. <frame… read more Rick Jelliffe

Why Jeff Atwood Is Right Firstly, I, like many of you, am glad to see that Dare Obasanjo's indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere was short lived. Secondly, while I most certainly agree with the premise of his recent "In Defense of XML" post -- which… read more M. David Peterson

CherryPy 3.1 Released CherryPy 3.1 is out and there are some exciting new features. The first exciting piece is the Web Site Process Bus. Robert Brewer had come up with an idea to create a generic server management API to help make management… read more Eric Larson

10% of top Google product features are broken every week. Result of Google culture - Roll out cool features, not focus on quality? My saga on problems with GMail continue. Despite of the -ve feedback ("GMail is working fine", "GMail is awesome', "Not sure why you are complaining GMail?" etc) to my posts, I continue to see the problems with GMail. I am… read more Hari K. Gottipati

RDF Parsing in XSLT During the recent discussion of the OAI-ORE drafts (which use RDF), the claim was made that RDF is serialized in RDF/XML and thus could be considered an XML representation of the underlying data model. My response to that was that… read more Erik Wilde

Freedom in Web Applications It is interesting to see the progression of free software along side the proliferation of the web. When I first started programming, I got involved with a web CMS I used in my contract work. I would write a new… read more Eric Larson

Associating Resources with Namespaces The W3C just published a new TAG Finding called Associating Resources with Namespaces. Here's the abstract: This Finding addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace. I don't quite understand why… read more Erik Wilde

Permanent URLs for things in the real world At the Semantic Technologies conference in San Jose I attended an interesting presentation entitled “persistent identifiers for the real web”. XML often uses URLs for identifying schema namespaces, and I suppose could be credited for influencing RDF’s practice of using… read more Taylor Cowan

Castoff hints? Rethinking interoperability and fidelity First some jargon (from the Glossary of Typesetting Terms or Harrod's Librarians' Glossary full props to Google.) Castoff: The calculation the number of typeset pages a manuscript will make, based on a character count. Proof: An impression made from type… read more Rick Jelliffe