Tuesday  2002-06-11   Software

Berkeley DB goes XML

Sleepycat will ship Berkeley DB XML, a native XML database later this year (2002). This is an interesting news considering how poorly native XML vendors are performing these days. Unlike the native XML vendors (eg Software AG), Sleepycat does not face competition from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft (who all support "native" XML in their latest offerings). Given Sleepycat's reputation of delivering tightly engineered products, Berkeley DB XML is something to look out for.

Wednesday  2002-06-05   Software

Cross platform WYSIWYG HTML editor

In the beginning Tim Berners-Lee made his original browser double as an WYSIWYG editor. Sadly this was not to last. Since then we have had two types of editors:

1. desktop application like Dreamweaver, Homesite, etc.
2. Java applets or Javascript running on browsers.

Now there is a truly browser neutral WYSIWYG HTML editor thanks to Stuart Schoneveld - another example of Flash's power of delivery and deployment. Given that Flash can be packaged into an executable, someday soon we may get an usable editor on both desktops and webtops, cross platform.

References: Timothy Appnel's blog Jon Udell's blog and his column The Universal Canvas

Wednesday  2002-05-22   Web of Services

Programs are Programs

John Walker's 1993 essay Programs are Programs on subscription service for software-on-demand has stood test of time rather well.

Monday  2002-05-13   Web of Services

Graham Glass on Gaia vs Jini

Graham Glass, CTO of the Mind Electric, explains differences between Gaia and Jini (from Glue mailing list at Yahoo). The Mind Electric is the makers of Glue (web services platform) and Gaia (P2P platform).

From: "Graham Glass" <graham@t...> Date: Mon Apr 15, 2002 1:30 pm Subject: RE: [MindElectricTechnology] a little more information about GAIA

Hi Luis,

GAIA is only like Jini in the sense that one of its goals is to make it easy to locate and share services. However, unlike Jini:

• it is neutral with respect to platforms and services
• it has built-in support for load balancing, clustering, failover
• it provides these features for data as well as services
• it has native integration with web services standards
• it is simple to use ;-)

GAIA does not treat services in a special way, so there is no "service announcement" as a standalone concept. GAIA makes it easy to publish information, to locate information, and to be informed when certain kinds of information become available. Similarly, there is no "directory service". Instead, GAIA nodes function as a kind of distributed information pool.

Cheers, Graham

Monday  2002-05-13   Development

Reverse literate programming

Reverse literate programming by Markus Knasmüller (Johannes Kepler University Linz) shows how a dynamic environment can vastly simplify extraordinarily cumbersome literate programming by use of effective hypertext and outliners (folding editor).

Friday  2002-05-10   Software

Tile based GUI/Windowing Systems

• Genera
• Oberon V4 and Oberon S3 (V4 compatible mode)
• Acme (for Plan9 and Inferno) and Wily (Unix)
• Whisker and other Smalltalk browsers

• ratpoison
• ion

Wednesday  2002-05-01   Web of Services

IBM's software chief speaks out

IBM's software chief speaks out on his company's strategy on Java, web services, XML, tools, etc. He understands important points even architects fail to grasp at all: "I write an application in Java and the application logic is written in Java. Nobody would write an application in XML. It doesn't make a lot of sense. You want to define data elements and interfaces in XML, it makes things interoperable by using XML." Sadly there are too many people who do it backwards.

On P2P as B2B: "Our model is business, not consumer. ... [P]eer-to-peer computing, inside a firewall or in a closed b-to-b environment needs to be scalable, secure, reliable, recoverable, and therefore the peer relationships between systems are server based. And server based peer-to-peer computing has been with us for decades, and that's principally what we do, is server based peer-to-peer computing."

On WebSphere: "[it is a session service control mechanism] that provides in a commercial world, management for a set of application functions, that provides control of the scheduling of tasks and processes and the attachment of users or threads to those processes..."

IBM Systems Journal may provide additional insight on these issues.