Jonas Beckman

Scripting News just wrote about The Brain getting a patent on their concept.

I bought The Brain a while ago, because it’s such a fascinating concept. But it’s just one attempt in an area where many people have had interesting ideas for years. If they follow through and make a great product, fine – but if they don’t, they should get out of the way when someone else takes the next step.

There has been no significant updates for a long time, developer support sucks and there are few serious applications in sight. Check out their discussion board – lots of users love the idea, but wonder if the product has been abandoned.

I feel sick when a company brags that their patent “creates a significant barrier to entry for companies considering developing similar technology”. They are not even close to doing what they are doing well enough, and maybe they never will – yet they try to stop the rest of the world from competing with better technology.

I just updated my page about modeling XML-documents with UML.

In the current rush towards distributed applications it’s easy to forget that lots of the old problems aren’t solved yet. Sometimes this is good: new ways of working makes problems disappear. But if they don’t, we just turn the usual mess into a complex distributed mess.

This week, I am helping a customer figure out how end users should edit structured documents. Their goal is to produce documents in a workflow context (using relevant business data) and distribute them as XML.

Currently, they write everything in Word. New business applications use a model-driven framework for implementing business logic. But there is no explicit support for structured documents.

So, how should they edit structured documents? None of the alternatives really shine.

• Keep writing in Word, use something else to keep track of the documents and export them to XML. Producing large structured documents in Word is a mess already!
• Buy an XML-editor. None on the market fits.
• Build an XML-editor. Fun – but expensive and takes time.
• Buy and customize an XML-editor. Expensive and takes time.
• Build an XML-editor from components. Almost as bad as building from scratch – unless there are components for all major requirements.
• Customize a web-browser, use a lightweight protocol for distribution. Lots of people are trying right now. Some will get it right

“Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit.”

I knew it! Thank you, Skeptic’s dictionary!