Alan’s (Old) Blogometer

How to deal with Web Service failures, a guide for Web Service Providers and Web Service Users alike.

Ran across this in XML-DEV, and Googled it. Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us, tells the story very well.
This is the right model. It’s very clever.
Google is moving past tags, and into different sorts of containers. The different components of this technology are going to allow people to create ad […]

That’s what this (yesterday, save draft) became, kinda, since there wasn’t much to do without a web server running. My Subversion respository is had through HTTPS, so I did feel comfortable working on code.
Watched a very silly movie with Veronica Lake on the TV.
Went into town. To the wrong Sweetwater’s Cafe to meet an Ed […]

I use slrn to read news.
I’m reading USENET again because of shell and Ruby programming. I can’t read USENET, though. I must use a scorefile.
My setup is very simple. It is a standard SLRN with scoring turned on is all. I’m not one for changing key bindings, or a great many patches, since I’ll […]

First, Let Me Say…
Ajax.
Ajax, Ajax, Ajax.
There I said it. Like the programmer in the OK/Cancel cartoon, I didn’t want to say it, but now I’ve said it. I said it once. I said it thrice. I’ll say it again. Ajax. I’ll call it, Ajax. Jesse James Garrett is not a bad guy. Packaging an idea […]

Not doing it for me. Same problem as as before. No place for idea capture. This can’t be both a place to record notes on development, and a place to introduce msyelf to other people. In this regard blogging is fundimentally flawed.
Tagging doesn’t fix it either.
There are dozen ideas about Ajax right now, and I […]

Relay pipelines and XSLT 2.0 make for some nifty resue of code.
I’m using XSLT 2.0 to generate JavaScript objects from XML. The JavaScript objects can be evaluated on the client site to perform actions in response to UI events, or in response to updates from XMLHttpRequest.
Here is a base example. For each article in […]

To get going with Ivy, I added dependency resolution to two projects that don’t have it already. BSF 3.0 and Mozilla Rhino.
Here’s an example build of BSF 3.0…

svn co http://engrm.com/svn/track/trunk/apache/jakarta/bsf/bsf3
cd bsf3
cp ivy-1.2a.jar $ANT_HOME/lib
ant

That one copy step could be omitted, since I expect everyone will have Ivy installed in the year to come.
The result is a […]

Couple days back I posted about how I don’t like Maven, and how I feel that Maven is not good for open source development.
If it’s one thing that I’ve learned in this last month, it’s that different systems have different advantages. Web chat boards loose information, for example, but that only means that people will […]

I’m looking forward to having Think New Orleans running.
The new software is going to be the basis of The Engine Room blog. I’m going to be blogging in the small, to record decisions. Using a blog as a developer’s notebook. Blog entries are not articles, and don’t require a title, or snappy writing.
There are so […]