Derek Odegard: Link (Tech)

This guy is going after a problem which drove me nuts a couple of years ago when I was working on my online Bible: the non-overlapability (my word) of XML tags. For example, I wanted to be able to do markup like this:

... <verse>xxxx xxx xxxxx</paragraph> <paragraph> xx xxxxx xx.</verse> ...

Poor Sysadmin's Guide to Remote Linux Administration

Two-stage recursive algorithms in XSLT:

This article presents several examples of two-stage recursive XSLT algorithms. In each of them the first stage is implemented as DVC (divide and conquer) recursive template, and the second stage as simple recursive template. The examples show that such a combination results in better performance than other solutions, including classic DVC-only algorithms.

Template Languages in XSLT: "This article will show you how to implement your own specialized template languages by building up a simple example capable of transforming a music database in XML into any form of HTML." Inspired by: Style-free XSLT Style Sheets.

Windows on a database - sliced and diced by BeOS vets. An Easter treat from Dominic and Benoit [The Register]

Tips for Scripting Java with Jython.

Wow! These look great:

DomAPI {courtesy glish}
Xml Extras {courtesy scottandrew.com}

Rafe Colburn pointed to an article on aspect programming, which is described as "the next phase of software engineering". Someone on the javalanche mailing list then sent along a link to this article, which says that "Xerox PARC has extended the Java programming language to allow aspect-oriented programming."

In the first article, Grady Brooch (described as "one of the fathers of object oriented programming (OOP) and co-founder of Unified Modelling Language (UML)") says:

If I were to look into my crystal ball in terms of the next generation of programming languages, my guess is it would be an aspect-oriented language...

Mozilla 1.0 is coming soon.

New to me: Java Data Objects (JDO), "an API to store and retrieve instances of Java programming language classes persistently in databases, mainframe systems or even local file systems." Apparently, not everyone likes it, but it seems to be gaining traction.

Verisign/Network Solutions is evil. But you knew that, right?

Articles I want to read when I get time:

Microcontent News: How the Church of Scientology is forcing Google to censor its critics.
On the Design of Application Protocols

Varny-varn-varn sent along this MSDN article comparing XSLT to Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit:

Because each [mobile] device can have a unique combination of capabilities, the Mobile Internet Toolkit provides an abstraction layer so developers can write applications without worrying about the specific details of each device.

I still think Cocoon is where it's at for targetting multiple platforms.

Business Week: "Today, people have a fondness for mixing, matching, and managing their tunes. Rip, mix, burn might sound like a hostile mantra to the Big Five labels. But it's a lifestyle for a generation of kids -- and for an increasing number of aging baby-boomers in their 50s and 60s. You can't legislate a lifestyle. Like a digital river, the flow of content over the Web will move around any obstacles."

XLink: Who Cares?

I got excited at the concept of linking that was more powerful than HTML's.... I looked forward to the creation of out-of-line links that connected two, three, or more resources into a single link without requiring write access to those resources. I saw how the ability to define and assign link types would ease the end user's difficulty in navigating the growing amount of connected information on the Web. I thrilled to the talk of linkbases becoming a new category of information product to buy and sell, creating new information by making intelligent connections between existing information.

Funny: "The IBM PC was created by people who drank alcohol. The Mac was created by people who smoked pot."

Stopping Spam with SpamAssassin.

New O'Reilly book: SAX2. Sample chapter: Producing SAX2 Events.

Best Practices with Expresso Framework using Struts:

The Expresso Framework, until version 3, had its own Model View Controller engine. It now integrates Struts, further reducing the amount of code that developers need to write. As well as having an MVC framework, Struts also has its own powerful custom tag actions. Custom tag libraries and their powerful bean introspection core further reduce the total amount of Java scriptlets in Java Server Pages.

Not sure what all of that means, but sure sounds powerful!

Proposed final draft: Java™ API for XML-Based RPC ("JAX-RPC")

XML Parsing With DOM and Xerces: part 1 and part 2.

mozBlog: "[Future improvements include] the new feature that automatically save draft posts. There are many future plans to go beyond blogging. Most of the ideas will be posted on my blog instead of in the bugzilla. One feature already in pipeline is to publish to disk, since I found mozblog useful while researching on the internet. Which is an accidently idea coming out of the feature for saving drafts."

Danny Goodman:

While simple events have been part of the JavaScript vocabulary since the first scriptable browsers, more recent browsers implement robust event models that allow scripts to process events more intelligently. The problem, however, is that in order to support a wide range of browsers you must contend with multiple advanced event models. Three, to be exact.

An interview with David Flanagan:

The current schedule calls for the release of the ECMAScript version 4 standard sometime in 2002. Although the new version of the language has many compelling features, it is also much more complicated than the current version, and I don't expect it to be commonly used in Web pages any time soon. It may be adopted in other contexts sooner, however.

O'Reilly Network: Hierarchical Menus with the Underrated style.display Object.