October 2004 - XML Nation

  • Me and XSD: setting the record straight

    After the first day of the XML DevCon last week, Jay Kimble wrote this post . While he pointed out that it was in fun, it said that I hate XSD enough times to make me think I should say something. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I prefer RelaxNG to...
  • Can OO be SO?

    Clemens Vasters has a post that touches on something I've been thinking about for some time. Basically, he shows 2 examples of messages representing a transfer of funds. In one, the account identifier is in the body of the message. In the other, it's...
  • The WS Kernel

    Steve Maine has a great post about Don 's talk at the DevCon . It really captures what's the most critical in the WS-* stack: XML, SOAP, WS-Addressing, XSD, WSDL, and WS-MetadataExchange. I agree. Those are the specs you should really understand. The...
  • Thoughts on the Applied XML DevCon

    I'm back home from the Applied XML DevCon . What a strange trip it was. It was great to spend 4 days with Chris (he took me to/from the airport and I let me stay at his house), see all the guys who still have blue badges and hang out with friends from...
  • Sam Ruby's approach to bridging SOAP and raw XML over HTTP

    After listening to my keynote at the Applied XML DevCon , Sam posted this idea for a way to bridge XML over HTTP and SOAP. The basic model is to make a message receiver do one of two things: - Convert from SOAP to raw XML by removing the Envelope/Body...
  • More on XSD 1.0a

    Gudge and I just talked about this idea . He pointed out that in W3C-speak a 2nd Edition is just a collection of errata. So this would really be XSD 1.0a. More importantly, he pointed out that xs:anyAttribute already exhibits the desired non-deterministic...
  • Dare points out a big problem with XSD 1.0 2nd Edition, but there's a solution

    Dare commented on my last post , pointing out that any old processor encountering an XSD with a special attribute wouldn't know the desired semantic and that would be a big problem. He's totally right. It would mean that the schema would process differently...
  • XSD 1.0 2nd Edition

    Several weeks ago I mentioned Noah Mendelsohn's proposal for two incredibly useful changes to XSD: Make element decls take precedence over wildcards, thereby allowing certain types of non-determinism Define a way to declare implicit extensibility points...
  • 3 faces of Web services

    A lot of people find the current state and ongoing evolution of the WS-* specifications confusing. I don't worry about that too much; I'm confident that it will all shake out in time. What concerns me more is the confusion over what constitutes a Web...
  • Still RESTless

    My last post on this was a while ago (vacation, new job) and there's been a ton of traffic about REST and WS-Transfer since then. I'm not going to wade back in, except to say that I agree with Don's post about Bill's post , which pretty much captures...
  • My first week at MindReef

    So I haven't posted for a while. I took a vacation (sans laptop!), and then started at MindReef . I spent most of my first week just getting my bearings (and getting used to going into an office every day). It's a big change going from a company of 57...
  • Construction Vehicle: Do Not Follow

    They've been working on the highway near my home for the last couple of years. Most of the heavy work is done, so all the new features are pretty easy to use. For a long time, though, it was a real mess. Lane patterns changed every other day. Sometimes...
  • More on the state of Web services...

    Don posted to add his two cents to the conversation with Michi. He points out that not dictating a programming language binding is an advantage, and I completely agree. He also mentions that he finds WS-ReliableMessaging increasingly interesting. I should...
  • Michi Henning weighs in...

    Michi Henning (who, together with Steve Vinoski, wrote the best book on CORBA there is), weighed in with a comment on my second post about the state of Web services . He hates to say “I told you so”, but feels compelled to anyway ;-). He referenced...
  • More on REST

    Mark continued our conversation with a comment on my recent post. Here's the text: Tim, REST doesn't constrain you to using HTTP, it only constrains you to using uniform operations. *Many* other protocols can be used in this fashion, including NNTP (which...