Jan 12
SOAP JMS binding
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , , . | icon4 01 12th, 2007| icon3No Comments »

Looks like the big guys finally got their act together and wrote both a specification for JMS IRI format and a SOAP JMS binding (via Dan Diephouse). Now, I’m certainly not the right person to judge the quality of the SOAP binding, but I do like the fact that there might actually be one soonish.

On the IRI format, its currently only based on using JNDI for identifying the connection factory and destination. However, with JNDI falling out a fashon the last couple of years and JMS commonly running outside the container, I find this a bit lacking. However, the spec leaves some leeway with the following quote:

JMS relies heavily on JNDI for interoperable functionality (vendor extensions may provide alternate means of acquiring a javax.jms.Destination, but only JNDI is interoperably specified).

That only covers the destination, not the connection factory. I would prefer that the spec more clearly allowed for both JNDI based and a more “freeform” syntax that’s up to providers to define. How about:

jms:jndi://connectionFactoryName/destinationName?params

and (for MQ in this example):

jms:wmq://queueManagerName/queueOrTopicName?params

ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ already has defined similar URL formats that could be adapted. JMS is inherently not interoperable between different providers anyway, so having these provider specific URLs wouldn’t hurt. And it would allow using them without having a JNDI implementation around.

Jun 25

The XML Query WG has announced what they belive is the completed release of the test suite for XQuery. All in all, it contains a whopping 14500 test cases. That’s what the WG think is necessary to fully test the complete specification, all 239 pages of it. I think it will be a crucial tool for ensuring combability between different XQuery implementations and might make XQuery skip the long period of incompability that most other specifications has to endure. I just wish that the SVG WG would make the same prioritizes, instead of trying to release yet another bloated spec long before the previous is even close to being proven and successful.

And, if 14500 test cases are required for XQuery compability, how many will be needed for WS-*?

May 1
Standardized wiki markup
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 05 1st, 2006| icon32 Comments »

Migrating from one wiki software to another is a pain. A few years back I migrated the SVG wiki from OpenWiki to PhpWiki (and since then it’s been migrated again, to MediaWiki). This was, a lot of really boring copy-paste work. Then again, a year ago I migrated our internal wiki at work from MoinMoin to Confluence. Again, boring, tedious work. All of this because different implementations can’t agree on the basic syntax for marking up stuff like headers, tables and bold text. Common, how hard can it be. There are already some attempts for a common markup out there. Can’t you just agree on one?

I agree with Jason Sankey that standardizing on one-shall-rule-them-all wiki syntax would be great, can it be done? In the meantime, maybe one should write an any-to-any wiki syntax converter. By using a common syntax/object model one could easily plug in additional syntaxes as they (undoubtably) come along. Anyone know of such a project already?

Dec 28
Wordpress 2.0
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 12 28th, 2005| icon31 Comment »

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. In total (removing 1.5 files, copying over the 2.0 files and the running the upgrade script) it took maybe 7 minutes. The theme and plugins all seem to work as expected. All data and configuration is just like before. That’s how simple an upgrade should be. Kudos to the Wordpress team!

Now I gonna see how the new spam filter support is working. Reports seem to be optimistic.

Dec 28
Apache spec project
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 12 28th, 2005| icon3No Comments »

Some Apache commiters are investigating how to set up a common project (possibly within Jakarta or as a top-level project) for specifications. Several projects (e.g. Tomcat, WS-*) uses these frequently and with Geronimo the numbers exploded. As they are used in multiple projects, having a common project makes a lot of sense.

I think this can be the start of an important project for Java developers as we will be getting access to high-quality, clean room and ASL licensed implementations of the specs, not only from JCP but also from OMG, W3C and the WS orgs.

Jul 15
Atom 1.0
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 07 15th, 2005| icon31 Comment »

Atom 1.0 has been published. Hopefully this means the begining of the end of the RSS mess.

Update: my Atom feed should now be valid Atom 1.0. I’ve extracted the RNC schema from the spec if anyone wants it handy.

Update: Thomas Broyer points out in the comments that the RNC schema is already available on atumpub

Jun 2
SVG on Canvas
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 06 2nd, 2005| icon3No Comments »

Antoine obviously has been really bored, so bored he even spent time on implementing a SVG renderer on top of WHATWG Canvas spec.

May 3
SVG enabled
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 05 3rd, 2005| icon3No Comments »

Tor has checked in some of the final missing pieces for fully enabling SVG in Firefox 1.1. First, the special build names has been removed (you know, for example with -svg-gdiplus) and SVG has been enabled (you now longer have to change the svg.enabled property to see SVG). This is very cool! We are now close to finally getting good (albeit not yet perfect) SVG support in the second and third most prevalent browsers out there (I have no hopes for native support in IE). SVG 1.1 (especially mixed in the same document/DOM as (X)HTML) is a powerful tool in the web developers toolbox and this might actually make quite a difference.

Now, how long until Google Maps comes in SVG?

Aug 22
Pie/Echo/Atom politics
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 08 22nd, 2003| icon3No Comments »

The politics of Pie/Echo/Atom is beeing discussed all over now. Aaron Swartz, Mark Pilgrim, Shelley Powers.

Aug 14
X3D
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 08 14th, 2003| icon3No Comments »

Len Bullard has written up a very comprehensive article on the current state of X3D.

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