Jonas Beckman

In response to mail from a fellow swedish developer:

I’ll skip the “what is XML?”-links. For those, try this – or maybe this one. My focus right now is interfacing XML documents in a custom-built editor with an objectoriented business framework – preferably via a lightweight network protocol.

Note that Pike can do something similar right now, using XML-RPC!

Eric Prudhomme of W3.org has a very good, short matrix comparing various XML-based network protocols. Discussions about this (and much else) are in the XML-dist-app newsgroup.

Personally, I think SOAP is the most interesting protocol, for several reasons, not the least that it explicitly supports XML-Schema as a mechanism for typing and extensibility. Also, the current scarcity of good implementations seems about to end soon – and Microsoft’s Web Services SDK will probably be released in April.

Note that the SOAP protocol doesn’t define exactly how complex object graphs should be serialized – but here is one way.

This is not a listing of “what is XML?”-links! If what’s what you need, try this – or maybe this one. I found this stuff useful while looking for something specific: how to interface XML documents in a custom-built editor with an objectoriented business framework – preferably via a lightweight network protocol.

Two pages I do skim every day looking for new stuff are Cafe con Leche and Scripting News.

Eric Prudhomme of W3.org has a very good, short matrix comparing various XML-based network protocols. Discussions about this (and much else) are in the XML-dist-app newsgroup. Here is another page about lightweight distributed protocols (not all of these use XML).

Personally, I think SOAP is the most interesting protocol, for several reasons, not the least that it explicitly supports XML-Schema as a mechanism for typing and extensibility. Also, the current scarcity of good implementations seems about to end soon – Microsoft’s Web Services SDK will probably be released in April.
Update: it is now July. An early implementation is out but incompatible with offerings from IBM and Userland. At Microsoft, marketing is going on about “.NET”, but real releases seem far away. Some things never change…

Note that the SOAP protocol doesn’t define exactly how complex object graphs should be serialized – but here is one way.

How many webloggers have sore throats right now? I found two at once: 2020HindSight and HaveBrowserWillTravel. And how many who had a cold today downloaded BeOS for lack of anything better to do?

I found some wonderful words from Linus Torvalds:

“Open source is about letting go of complete control. Accept the fact that other people are wonderful resources to fixing problems, and let them help you.”

Read it in context here.

And just after I had read that, someone called to help me with a very tricky situation over which I did not have control. I can’t be specific about it, but it doesn’t matter. You know who you are – thank you!

“In my soul, I know that feeling so well. The stressful, crushing weight of circumstance. The feeling of calamity, fear and the world moving in ways that seem wrong. And the emergence out of the narrowness with the world open ahead, full of purpose.”

This quote is from James Vornov. I always thought On deciding better was interesting and probably very clever – but a little too smug. But today, there is lots of heart!

Had a cold and stayed home today. I have absolutely no idea why I am writing this down. Except maybe to say Hi! to anyone who has been here before. I’ll be back – you drop by again, too.

Tech warning: this page might not make much sense unless you already know what Manila does and at least heard about Pike.

First – I think Dave is doing something very beautiful here, by letting the public come to the party! He – and many other people – have had dreams about the perfect editor for years. This has failed – ultimately because everyone has stuck to his own vision. I hope Pike can really become “The web’s first outliner”.

OK – so I create a story and post this sentence, just to get started.

Then I click the Pike button and switch to Pike – the story is there! But… I can’t enter any text. The mouse works, but it’s impossible to click into “edit mode”. Many seconds later, it suddenly works.

Meanwhile, in the Pike Beta discussion group, Frank McPherson has posted some very astute observations about what it feels like to use Pike. Since this is a beta, it’s obviously no big deal that the renderer still needs some work.

But how usable an outliner eventually can become for a “naive” user is a question that’s been around for many years now.

Someone (I will find the link!) recently wrote very eloquently about the magic of outlining – and finished by saying that he had been writing his outlines in Word for years. Well, so do I. Even though I own Frontier I don’t use it as a general writing tool.

Also, I find myself wondering about the rules in Pike. Why not use standard CSS or XSL – and why not use templates, a la Manila?

Frank (and obviously many others) didn’t understand why web pages open Pike, instead of the other way around: “Why not start a new story from Pike?”. Dave had two good reasons on the webcast: configuring Pike to listen to servers is error-prone and unfriendly for the user, and polling can become very hard on the server. These are good but not obvious reasons.

Pike is amazing – but Dave is raising the bar here. I think Pike has to become a little easier than Frontier’s outliner, or the users who never edit an HTML template or a site structure in XML just won’t get it.

I will share a little story: I recently tried to build a Word-compatible, XML-based, multi-user editor that transparently streamed documents to the server. We did – and it worked, all the hard parts eventually became easy! We had a nice lightweight network protocol, we could handle multiple users, stream objects over the wire, persist documents to a database, even render XML as RTF (using a customized XSL-processor)… I could go on. But the users didn’t like it. Why? Because the text area where the end users spend their time didn’t work according to expectations. And it proved non-trivial to fix this quickly.

Anyway, that was in-house (where access to users is always a problem) – this is the web! I hope Pike will continue as it has started, as a great learning experience for everyone.

Saturday, Stockholm. It’s getting colder, after another very sunny day. My beatiful girlfriend Aila took some pictures, they’ll probably show up on her Manila page. We’re nine hours ahead here, so right now, she’s out shopping for dinner.

Times below are Pacific – I’m actually 9 hours ahead
Dave was hoping for 10 AM, the last update of Scripting News was 9:58. It’s now 10:29, so I guess he’s having a conversation with Murphy … no, wait. 10:30 and here it is!

10:41 – OK, I’ve got the software, and have read everything. I get this error message: “Can’t open stream because TCP/IP error code 10060 – Connection timed out.” I’m on a cable modem right now – maybe I should try the modem? Or maybe everyone is doing this right now? I’ll check out the discussion group

11:38 – Problems fixed. This is written in Pike! However, my girlfriend is now waiting with a delicious dinner, so this is it for a while.

it’s now sunday morning – Manila thinks I should Flip Homepage according to Pacific time, so I will wait until then to post more. Update: Tomorrow is here!

I can use my site again – maybe the network problems Dave Winer reported are fixed? It’s early morning here in Sweden, I guess most americans are still sleeping. (Update: Yes!)

Everyone writing on the web has to make different distinctions between professional, personal and private. Good judgement will always be necessary, of course – but some webloggers have site designs that directly reflect the choices they have made.

Many webloggers write both long stories and short “log-style” entries. For instance, Dave Winer uses two different sites: DaveNet and Scripting News. With Manila, the calendar does everything you want (well, almost) for basic logging. But where should the other stories go?

I don’t know, yet. Or rather… not taking the time for a complete re-design is the choice reflected by this site right now.

Yesterday CamWorld linked to a story about the increasing size of business magazines, and how it makes them impossible to read. Cam realized he bought them but didn’t read them anymore. And of course, this morning I found an unread issue of Harvard Business Review in the pile of books and magazines by my bed.

I tried to get a picture of the pile into my computer. But the funky Sony-branded parallell-port adapter and it’s stupid software wouldn’t let me. “Because we can’t!” Hi Gary

When I browsed the magazine, I found an article about how to keep employees. Summary:

• The niggers are uppity these days.
• Some ways of making it difficult to leave still work.
• Make deals with other employers, so there is nowhere to go.
• Resort to short term bribes whenever necessary.

All this written in the sickening nihilistic voice of someone trying to please his masters and reassure himself at the same time.

OK. So I was studying the enemy. Now what?

I take a break. It’s lunch time in Sweden and the sun is shining – after all these dark months, everyone is almost religious about it!

The day before yesterday I found Daily meditations for the computer entranced. Try reading just one every day – it’s surprising how difficult that is.
Thank you, Array

Some time ago, I was wondering why we all run around with camcorders, putting whatever is around us on webpages? I just got a nice mail from Gary Secondino at iSee iSay, who says it’s really simple: Because we can!.
Well, he is right, of course: we have wanted to for a long time and now we can – so we do.

But… why did we want to in the first place? That’s the hard question. Maybe hard enough to be pointless, but I still wonder.

The weird thing about being connected to the Net is that it feels like the most natural thing in the world. If you read this you are probably like me: utterly unsurprised. Yes, we did want this for a long time.

So what happens when we get we want, bigtime? “Be careful what you wish for…” might apply. But I think we all get to learn more about what we really want.

The chinese saying “May you live in interesting times” was actually a curse. But I am not an ancient chinese. I think of surfing: the sea is always stronger than we are, but we still surf.