For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.
The idea that an application wears its state information on its sleeve, readily available for users to bookmark, modify, and trade, is an underappreciated strength of Web-based software. As the RIA bandwagon picks up steam, let's honor that idea and find a way to move it forward.
The way forward, Geer suggests, is not to abandon ACLs but rather to augment them with aggressive monitoring that holds people accountable for behaviors that can’t economically be permitted or denied.
A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
...collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest.
Discussions about open source and innovation tend to cluster around two opposing memes. One says that open source can't innovate; the other that only open source can innovate. Both are wrong.
Bosworth's hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need -- both offline and online.
Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions.
Fault tolerance, service-level agreements, access control, and business activity monitoring are among the many things enabled by intermediaries that watch (and sometimes transform XML) message flows.
We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash, but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all.
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
"His current technical interests include alternative transaction models, aspect-oriented programming, statistical modeling of distributed applications, and streaming XML"
"I'm short and I have the remnants of a southern accent," Paul says in a recent interview. Co-founder of Digital Creations, now Zope Corporation, Paul evangelizes the powerful Zope/Python combo.
CTO of Propylon, and previously co-founder of Digotome, Sean has served as an invited expert on W3C committees, and is a widely respected authority on XML.
Amidst the controversy over XML formats for office documents, it's important not to lose sight of the fundamental benefits that accrue simply from using XML. Michael Tiller has a nice ancedote that drives home the point. Here's the setup: a small engineering firm, Excel expense reports, each must be dispensed on demand to an employee and coded with a unique number. And here's what Michael did:
I took the Excel spreadsheet she gave me (in .xls format) and wrote it out in Microsoft's new Excel XML format. Then I uploaded it to the Zope server and turned that XML into a Page Template. Then, I could apply any TAL transformation I wanted to it.
Very cool.
So, I created a very simple Gadfly database that keeps track of expense report requests so that each one would get a unique ID and then I wrote a tiny Python script to generate the unique ID based on the state information in the database. Once all this was in place, I just added a very simple set of TAL directives to the original template and viola...each request generates a unique Excel document. [Michael Tiller: XML, web services, and business processes]
TAL is the Zope Template Attribute Language. It's used by Zope-based content management systems, like Plone, to enable XML or XHTML documents to function as CMS templates. The output of a transformed template is, of course, normally a web page. Here it's a spreadsheet. Michael notes that downlevel Excel clients can't read it but, when Office 12 makes XML the default format, this downlevel support should appear for pre-Office 2003 versions.
The Plone scenario is, of course, just one of a million different ways to skin this particular cat. And that's a huge win regardless of how the format tussle plays out.
What I like about this tiny example is that it's representative of how spreadsheets are mostly used in the real world -- to do simple things, like add columns in expense reports. Whether or not Microsoft decides to officially support the OpenDocument format, it's hard for me to imagine that transformations between it and Excel's SpreadsheetML -- for all the basic functionality, at least -- won't be trivial and ubiquitous.
Granted, I've internalized the idea of XML transformation to the point where I tend to regard two formats related by a transformation as, effectively, the same thing. But that's precisely the point. It's just data. Exposing it as XML matters more than how exactly we do that.
 
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