Textorizer
Textorizer is a little wrapper I’ve put together for Max Froumentin’s SVG generator. There is a flickr pool to share your pictures, flag up bugs and discuss ideas.
Technorati Tags: flickr, SVG, textorized, w3c
{ Monthly Archives }
December 2005
On Innovation
Don likes the innovation of a search box top-right in IE7. I wonder how it compares to the gloriously extensible Firefox Search Engine, or Norm’s cool toolbar bookmarklet hack. Seems like 2006 is set see another round of browser and search engine wars, and that can only be a good thing for Joe Surf.
Clunk-Click!
A few years ago I stepped into the front seat of a taxi in Madrid and put on my seat belt only to realise my defensive action had insulted the driver. It wasn’t his driving ability I was worried about so much, just every other nutter on the Spanish highway. Anyway, I just had a similar feeling whilst browsing the Vonage Developer’s Center [sic]. So far they have a single service ‘Third Party Call Control‘. Whilst they provide a nice simple URI to HTTP GET the address book, (it’s a shame they put the password as a parameter), this is the bit that bothers me:
The W3C recommends
using HTTP POST instead of GET for URLs like these,
however both are supported.
So they know they’re not safe and they’re breaking Web Architecture but just don’t seem to want you to buckle-up.
Mixed Advice to the Lost
A nicely thought out and tactfully written piece from Erik in response to Dare’s rather mixed message.
“Just Use XML” might be something I personally agree with, but reminds me of the joke about being lost and asking a local expert directions and being told “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you ..”, er right, thanks!
It’s the essence of XML, the Web and Web services that as a sender I don’t impose how to implement or even to a large extent process the information exchanged. Like it or not many customers still demand tools to keep them safe in their own world, oblivious to the reality of a rain of angle brackets. We’re in this mess now precisely because suppliers gave many users their first fix of databinding for free - exactly what they thought they wanted. Unsurprisingly customers who were hooked, bought into them in droves and Microsoft as a company continues to promote and sell databinding in their tools and products, though have some visionary products such LINQ in the pipeline.
So Dare’s piece had me feeling flat about ever getting vendors to think about the problem in hand until I read his comment offering advice to Anil on how to cope in the current environment:
(i) if you are consuming web services, then consume them as XML instead of using the object to XML mapping that your toolkit provides. Most toolkits allow you to get at the underlying XML of a SOAP response.
.. right, “don’t start from here” and “impose a implementation choice on my potential customers” ..
(ii)if you are exposing web services then use as few XSD features as possible. I’d limit it to basic types (integer, float, boolean and datetime) and constructs (sequence, any, choice) with a few other limitations. This can be achieved by taking a code-first approach to building the service and not using ‘fancy’ datatypes like the ADO.NET DataSet.
FX: Slaps head in disbelief! - That’ precisely what the XML Schema Patterns for Databinding WG aims to document. In the meantime customers to continue to have to guess what bits of XML Schema Microsoft and other vendors actually implement. You know, dear vendors, it takes more than one to interoperate!
Technorati Tags: databinding, schemaexperiences, w3c
Pall
We live a good 5 miles from the Buncefield Explosion and were oblivious until we turned on the radio this morning. However, one of my flickr contacts lives a little further away was woken up in time to take some amazing dawn shots, see also the Buncefield Fuel Depot Explosion Pool and my small set of geotagged photos.
Technorati Tags: Buncefield, flickr, news
One in the Kissr!
Flickr
and del.icio.us sitting a tree, ki.ss.ing, congrats to Jeremy and Yahoo!.
Technorati Tags: flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo!
RPC/doc-literal divide
Great post from Tim commenting on Jon’s post on Eric’s TV appearance [--that's enough name dropping]. Whilst I agree it’s possible to be rpc or document based regardless of whether your WSDL description is rpc, document or documentwrapped I think there is one profound difference between encoded and literal, and that’s interoperability.
Encoding is all about mapping and binding data into programming models and databases. It supports graph structures, encourages Schema annotations in the message in the form of xsi:type as well as a bunch of data structures under the control of the Section 5 soapenc attributes, which is particularly useful when binding dynamic languages such as Perl and Python. Most of all, it constrains the vocabulary of Schema used by WSDL to describe those messages. All this makes databinder to databinder tools interoperate well but processing encoded messages a nightmare at the document level in XML, SAX, DOM, XPath and wot-not. It’s impossible to transform XML into a SOAP encoded document generically - you need access to the per message description.
In a marvelous piece of aspiration and led by Tim’s seminal MSDN article, the WS-I Basic Profile deprecated encoding, which was all well and good, but opened up code generators and soapbuilders to the full gamut of a W3C XML Schema description. Three years on, and Databinding tools used by so many to process Web services are still struggling to interoperate with literal documents, and Schema authors are clueless if their description is going to work with their customers’ toolkits.
Shameless plug: Enter the W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding WG, chartered to deliver a pair of W3C Recommendations to specify how to describe messages in XML Schema and yet interoperate with Databinding tools. Ask serious questions of anyone who sells you a databinding tool and isn’t planning to participate in this important new Working Group!
Technorati Tags: databinding, w3c, WebServices, XML
inconvinence => incontinence
A real Monty Python “my hovercraft is full of eels” moment courtesy of Microsoft Outlook. I know my spelling stinks, but surely not that much!
