Open Source Pixels

According to multiple observers, Microsoft’s OpenXML is on its way to becoming an ISO standard. The three sites that have been following the International Organization for Standardization re-vote on the OpenXML standard—Command Line Warriors, Open Malaysia and ConsortiumInfo—are all reporting that, barring some unforeseen circumstances, OpenXML will become an ISO standard. Since none of the authors at these sites is pro-OpenXML, it seems a foregone conclusion that Microsoft was successful in its OpenXML standardization efforts.

bprom is a console application used to handle
(E)EPROMs with the µ-prom and µ-prom 2001
programmers by the German brand Dr. Böhm GmbH. The
µ-prom 2000 and µ-prom 3000 are still untested,
but should work in 2001 mode.

OBM is a groupware, email, LDAP, Windows PDC, CRM, and project
management application. It is mainly used as an Exchange or Notes/Domino
groupware and mail server replacement, as an LDAP directory, as
a Windows PDC, as a contact and customer database, as a project
management tool, or as any combination of these functions. It provides
groupware (calendars, contacts, and tasks) connectors for Outlook,
Thunderbird/Lightning, and PDAs. It supports internationalization and
themes. It is highly scalable, and is used by sites from five to many
thousands of users.

Shipyard is a module to process data in a format
inspired by email headers (RFC 2822). The goal of
shipyard is to have a simple, human readable, and
human writable replacement for CSV that works
better for long data and many rows and doesn’t
need difficult escaping rules for special characters.

CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser “Web Desktop Environment”, “Web Operating System”, or “Web Office” that comes with a set of cool applications. It includes a Content Management System (CMS) so that you can easily set up and manage your own website as well as a Database Management System that allows you to rapidly build any kind of database application.

“Windows’ enterprise adoption declined in 2007, with the gains going to Linux and Mac OS. Vista is a bust. Forrester published the data on Thursday, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at 2,300-plus large to very large enterprises throughout 2007. Windows’ enterprise adoption declined 3.7 percent, going from 98.6 percent in January to 94.9 percent in December. Mac OS gained 3 percent, going from 1.2 percent to 4.2 percent in the same time frame. Linux gained 0.5 percent in 2007.” A classic case of ‘do with it as you please’.

Linus Torvalds has a sense of humour. “Youtube no workee - Fedora 9 not usable for wife.” So begins a bug he filed on Fedora’s Bugzilla. “I didn’t try a lot of videos, but I couldn’t find a single one that actually worked. And what’s the internet without the rick-roll? Some just show a light gray background, some give the play buttons etc, but show only a black screen even when the red ball at the bottom moves along. Steps to reproduce: 1. Install current Fedora 9; 2. Rick-roll!; 3. No profit!” Thanks to Fefes Blog and dr_evil in #haiku for pointing this one out.

There hasn’t been much of a stampede to implement Internet identity management in the consumer space. Microsoft’s Passport was the first serious attempt. OpenID is the second, and as far as I know those two are it. Passport is like a zombie; it never quite dies, but isn’t really alive either. It just shambles along, dropping body parts here and there, and often forgetting its own name.

Learn how to develop complex applications consisting of many components and Web services using BPEL V2.0. This article describes how to combine the Eclipse BPEL plug-in for development of processes and Apache ODE for their execution.

Bill recently commented on another small flare up on the REXML front. It is too bad that Ruby doesn’t have a better set of libraries for XML. As Bill mentions, Python does a great job with XML. He mentions ElementTree, which is definitely better than something like pure DOM. Lxml is another option, which actually implements the ElementTree API and includes some pretty slick objectify functionality. Ian recently performed some rather unscientific, but still interesting, benchmarks on some Python libraries for parsing HTML. Ian found lxml to be quite the performer. There is also the 4Suite and Amara toolset that provides a very comprehensive suite of XML tools including an entire XML/RDF based document repository and full featured XSLT engine.

It makes me wonder why the Ruby community have not stepped up with some better options. The Python community is very similar in that XML has not been a hallmark of the community as compared to Java or .NET. One argument could simply be time, since Python has been around a bit longer. No matter the reason, I think it is time for the Ruby community to consider stepping up and producing a healthy alternative to REXML. My first steps would be to start with the libxml bindings and go from there. Lxml and Amara have both proven that utilizing a fast C library for the grunt work pays off in the end.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that REXML is still a pretty great tool. It meets the needs of many of its users, which is more than many software projects seem to accomplish. With that in mind, lets not stop there when we can do even better to make Ruby a great language for working with XML.