Auteur/autrice : Eric van der Vlist

Why XML Experts Should Care About Web 2.0

Here is the talk I had prepared for the Web 2.0 panel a the XML 2006 conference. This has been a very interactive panel and even though I haven’t pronounce exactly the same sentences, the message is the same.

I had proposed a whole session titled “Why XML Experts Should Care About Web 2.0”. I have tried to shrink this 45 minutes presentation to fit within a 5 minutes slot, but that didn’t really work. Instead of presenting the result of this hopeless exercise, I will use a well known metaphor. Of course, metaphors do not prove anything but they are great to quickly illustrate a point and that’s what I need. 

Bamboo stems can reach 40 meters in height with diameters up to 30 cm and some species can grow over one meter per day. Despite that, they are so strong that in Asia they are used to build scaffoldings for sky scrappers. These performances are due to the tube like structure of stems reinforced by their nodes.

It recently occurred to me that the IT technology (and probably science in general) is progressing like bamboos and alternates periods of fast innovation with periods of consolidation. It is interesting to note that the prominent actors for these phases are often different. Consolidation builds on prior experience and is a good work for established experts. On the other hand, expertise often tends to censor new ideas and it can seriously limit the ability to innovate. 

This theory is well illustrated by the history of the World Wide Web. 

In the eighties and early nineties, hypertext experts were stuck by the complexity of their models and a new phase of innovation began with the invention of HTTP and HTML. 

The consolidation phase was launched ten years ago by Jon Bosak when he said “You have to put SGML on the web. HTML just won’t work for the kinds of things we’ve been doing in industry.”

In five years time, this consolidation phase grew to a stage where the XML stack is so heavy that it looks like legacy. Its development is almost stalled and a new innovation phase was badly required. 

Those of you who know me know me as an XML expert and as many XML experts the crazy hype that is obscuring Web 2.0 kept me away for a long time.  

I started to look what’s behind the hype a year ago. Having done so, I am happy to report that Web 2.0 could be the next innovation phase. 

A good indication is that XML experts predict that Web 2.0 will fail for the same reasons hypertext experts predicted that HTML would fail: Web 2.0 is messy, over simplistic, not well enough designed, … 

If Web 2.0 is the next innovation phase, what should we do? 

We can contribute, actively follow the growth of the phenomena, provide guidance but we should avoid to be too directive for the moment. 

My first personal contribution is my book “Professional Web 2.0 Programming”. This book is for anyone wanting to catch the Web 2.0 wagon. It’s also a set of reminders and guidances by we’ve tried to be as open as possible and for instance, we have covered not only XML but its alternatives (including controversial technologies such as JSON).

If we keep ready, our turn will come again when the next consolidation phase starts.  

This consolidation phase will eventually put XML on the Web like XML has (at least partially) put SGML on the Web. 

Will XML on the Web still be XML? Maybe not: SGML on the Web is no longer SGML, why should XML necessarily survive to the next iteration? Anyways, does that really matter? 

Our Web 2.0 book appears to be tough to classify

I have arrived in Boston yesterday evening to participate to the XML 2006 conference.

Today, I spent most of my time walking in the town and I couldn’t resist to enter in the first bookshop I found to check if they had our new Web 2.0 book.

This bookshop happened to be Borders, 10 School Street and it took me a while to find the book because it was neither with the other books about the Web nor with other suspects such as books about Ajax but together with my XML Schema book and HTML 4 for dummies (I haven’t understood why this other book was there either) between a bunch of books about XSLT.

Our book is probably difficult to classify because it covers a lot of subjects but, even though I have been involved in it, it is certainly not a book about XML and should rather be classified as a book about the Web!

Professional Web 2.0 programming for real

I’have received my personal copies of our Web 2.0 book and they look really good.

I really like the kind foreword from Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, especially when she says this book is very much about how, through technology, you can capture and delight your users. This should be the tagline of our book!

She goes on and adds: Web 2.0 is really a developer’s paradise! and that’s really what we’ve felt while we wrote the book.

I am also impressed by the ground we’ve covered while keeping the book relatively short. I wrote in the outline that I have sent to the publishers to sell my book idea that my goal wasn’t to write a Web 2.0 bible and I had set the prospective page count to 450. If you don’t take the index into account, we are very close to our target with our 492 pages.

The real challenge was to use this limited space to cover an incredibly large landscape: Web 2.0 is about using a dozen of different technologies together. Your reviews will tell but I think that we have been quite successful in selecting the most important things that you need to know to combine these technologies into successful Web 2.O applications.

I had the chance to give a talk about Web 2.0 at sparklingPoint yesterday evening and had a copy with me to circulate after my talk. The audience included several Web 2.0 developers and they spent more time that I had expected to glance through the book.

Their comments are positive and they appreciate in particular the fact that we have a full chapter about HTTP, a fundamental brick of the Web which is misunderstood by too many developers.

Now that the book is available, like Caterina Fake, I look forward to seeing the results the readers of this book will bring into being!

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!