Mois : novembre 2006

Qu’attendez-vous de XMLfr?

Après en avoir discuté avec l’équipe de rédaction, j’ai envoyé sur la liste xml-tech un long message intitulé Qu’attendez-vous de XMLfr?.

J’y décrit brièvement l’évolution du site depuis sa création début 2000 et mes projets pour redonner un peu plus de dynamisme au site.

N’hésitez pas à prendre part au débat et à me dire, que ce soit sur la liste, par un mail individuel ou en commentaire à ce billet, ce que vous attendez de XMLfr.

Next year at ATHENS

I gave my Web 2.0 tutorial for ATHENS 2006 yesterday afternoon and it was the first time I had the opportunity to teach to « real » students.

A few of them were really sleepy but the organizers had kindly warned me that their Parisian nights were pretty busy and that it was to be expected…

Most of the others looked on the contrary interested and the audience was much more friendly and participative than the typical audience of professional conferences.

They did ask a lot of questions and warmly applauded me at the end of my talk.

The content of the tutorial is really heavily technical with a lot of code snippets and HTTP traces. Its duration (three hours) is adequate and I think it has been well received even though there are at least two points that can be improved:

  • I was surprised to see that in slide show mode, OpenOffice Impress didn’t show any pointer (of course that wasn’t the case when I had rehearsed on my own PC). My presentation includes a lot of links and I was not able to click on these links since I couldn’t find out when they were selected! That has been quite disturbing and I had to switch into edit mode to get the pointer back each time I wanted to follow a link. During the break, I eventually discovered that there is a slide show option to make the mouse pointer visible and that made my life much easier during the second part. That’s something I need to remember for my next presentations!
  • I need to add some diagrams to visualize the exchanges between the browser and the server. There are many of them in my sample Web 2.0 application. Showing the HTTP traces is useful but some diagrams would help to understand the sequencing of actions and exchanges.

I have asked to the students to use my email address to send me their feedback and I hope they won’t hesitate to do so.

The organizers, Jacques Prévost and Didier Courtaud, seemed please enough to invite me to participate to the next edition and I should be involved in the ATHENS program again next year.

XML Power, a book powered by the XML Guild

We’ve sent the final editions of our chapters of XML Power to our editor and the book should be available fairly soon. But, did we need yet another book on XML?

XML Power should be different…

XML Power is the first book written by the XML Guild.

We have thought we needed a common project to work together and learn to know each other better. We also wanted to create a set of common high quality materials that we could reuse. And of course we would like to increase our visibility.

Many of us have already written books and we rapidly came to the conclusion that we would write a collective book.

Why should it be different?

The primary motivation of this book is non commercial. We wrote it to share our enthusiasm for the technologies we use in our day to day work and to be a showcase of our activity. We have been lucky enough to find a publisher, Thomson, which have leaved us entirely free to determine the content of the book.

The book is not meant to be exhaustive. It’s not a new XML Bible and we don’t pretend that you will learn everything about XML. Instead it includes a series of points that each author has believed to be primordial in his or her domain.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I have written the chapter about XML schema languages. Instead of doing my usual introduction to each of the big three languages, I have decided to show what you can do when you reach a blocking point with W3C XML Schema.

The idea is that most users start by using W3C XML Schema and get rapidly blocked by a validation requirement that they can’t meet. This chapter is for them: it takes three examples increasingly difficult to solve to show a number of different solutions.

As I said, a purpose of this book is to produce reusable content and the contract that we have negotiated leaves us full rights over anything else than printed copies of the book in English. I have used this opportunity to derive a new tutorial from this chapter and will have the pleasure to deliver it at XML 2006 under the title XML schemas: breaking your chains.

The team involved in this book includes, by order of apparition in the book, Ken Holman, Evan Lenz, Zarella Rendon, Nikita Ogievetsky, Jeni Tennison, Benoît Marchal, Tony Coates, Michael Kay, Priscilla Walmsley, Ronald Bourret and Betty Harvey with the kind support of other guild members.

The book owes a lot to Zarella Rendon who has taken the burdens to act as a project manager and negotiate with publishers and it would probably have never been published nor even started without her contribution.

I probably don’t need to say that it has been fun to write: I have already said so of all my previous books (except XML Schema which has been a nightmare to write because the language is so horrible) and it probably just means that I enjoy writing books. Anyway; as you can imagine, working with such a dream team has been a nice experience.

I hope that this book will be as fun to read than it has been to write.

Newspapers 2.0

Ifra has published a new special edition of their magazine, newspaper techniques, dedicated to Web 2.0. Ifra present themselves as the world’s leading association for newspaper and media publishing and this special edition shows the level of interest from the newspaper industry for these new technologies.

I had the pleasure to contribute to this edition a paper giving some tips for transforming a 1.0 site into Web 2.0 and the table of content also includes an interview from Tim O’Reilly, a general and a more technical introduction, two case studies, a brainstorming with newspapers suppliers and a glossary.

This special edition is a good introduction to Web 2.0 which should be useful beyond the communities of newspaper and media publishing.

It can currently be downloaded free of charge as a Flash document on the Ifra newspaper techniques ePaper web site.

Teaching Professional Web 2.0 Programming

I’ll have the pleasure to give a training based on chapter 1 of our book this coming Thursday (23/11/2006) from 2:00 to 5:00 pm (CET) for the ATHENS program.

Although this training is not publicly accessible but reserved to students who have registered through their University or Institution, it will be publicly broadcast and archived on the Internet.

The training will include a short introduction of Web 2.0 along the lines of my blog entry on the subject followed by the detailed presentation of a simple yet complete Web 2.0 mashup application.

This application is « BuzzWatch », the same sample application that I have developed for chapter 1 our book « Professional Web 2.0 Programming« . Server side, BuzzWatch is written in PHP 5 and it takes advantage of easy XML, SQLite and Cache_Lite. Client side, it makes extensive use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library.

This will be a tech heavy session which follows, like we do in the book, each action, tracing HTTP exchanges, scanning the web server log and digging into the JavaScript and PHP code to introduce the main technologies and issues you find while developing Web 2.0 applications.

BuzzWatch comes in four different versions:

  1. The first version exhibits the downsides of naive Web 2.0 applications: the pages have no URIs, the back button doesn’t work, …
  2. The second one fixes these issues at the price of code duplication between the client and the server
  3. The third version eliminates this code redundancy
  4. The fourth one makes BuzzWatch a good Web citizen with cool URIs

BuzzWatch can be downloaded and discussed on WROX site.

It’s been fun to develop and to write down first for the book and then for this training and I hope that it will be as fun to read and follow!

A short URI on Amazon.com for our book

I am impressed! I wasn’t aware that such things did exist… Amazon.com has been kind enough to give us a short URI for our book Professional Web 2.0 Programming. This URI is http://www.amazon.com/web2-0thebook/.

This is a short and cool URI indeed and if, being a cool URI, it doesn’t change our book will always remain THE Web 2.0 book for Amazon.com!

However, as I pasted it my Web browser, I noticed that this short and cool URI was immediately replaced by http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Web-Programming-Eric-Vlist/dp/0470087889/.

Being suspicious, I tried:

vdv@grosbill:/tmp $ curl -D - -A  "Mozilla/4.0"  http://www.amazon.com/web2-0thebook/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:05:22 GMT
Server: Server
Set-Cookie: skin=; domain=.amazon.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 01-Aug-01 12:00:00 GMT
Location: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Web-Programming-Eric-Vlist/dp/0470087889/
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/plain
nnCoection: close

A 301 HTTP response code! This code is meant for obsolete resources:

10.3.2 301 Moved Permanently

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise. The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

Amazon.com have given us an obsolete URI! I would have much preferred a 302 (FOUND) which seems to be exactly our situation, a 303 (See Other) or even a 307 (Temporary Redirect) since none of these codes carries this meaning of a URI that should no longer be used.

I was also wondering if this URI can be used with Amazon partners tags and I tried:

vdv@grosbill:/tmp $ curl -D - -A  "Mozilla/4.0" http://www.amazon.com/web2-0thebook/?tag=<mytag>
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:07:28 GMT
Server: Server
Set-Cookie: skin=; domain=.amazon.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 01-Aug-01 12:00:00 GMT
Location: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Web-Programming-Eric-Vlist/dp/0470087889/
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/plain
nnCoection: close

There might other solutions, but the answer seems to be « no »: the query string is stripped during the redirect and the cookie which is set doesn’t carry this information either. This means that when we use this short URI, we are not treated as Amazon.com affiliated sites.

Anyway, I shouldn’t be that picky! Thanks Amazon.com, this is a short and cool URI even if its implementation could be improved :) …