Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: October 2002

  • It seems that developers everywhere are scrambling to take care of the RSS bandwidth issue.  That’s awesome.

  • RSS Validator: Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim have teamed up to tame the RSS feeds.  We got a sneak peek of the RSS Validator at Web Services DevCon East, but it’s great to see it live.  My feed validates, how about yours?

  • Jeremy Zawodny has figured out his problems with threading in MySQL on FreeBSD:

    If you compile your own MySQL server on FreeBSD and link with the LinuxThreads library, make sure to compile with the -DHAVE_BROKEN_REALPATH option.

    The short version is that FreeBSD’s realpath() isn’t thread-safe. That causes badness with LinuxThreads on FreeBSD, because MySQL uses lots of relative paths and globally shared file descriptors may end up pointing to all the wrong places. I’ll explain in more detail if I get a chance.

  • XML-RPC is Not Dead Yet

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    I had a chance this past week to evaluate Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library for XML-RPC programming.

    It’s a nicely designed library that makes it trivial to create an XML-RPC server or software that makes XML-RPC calls. Remote methods are called in a manner comparable to calling any other method in Java — XML-RPC and networking are handled by the library.

    Once you have figured out which Java data types to use in remote method calls and remote methods, described in this table, it’s easy to add XML-RPC support to a Java class.

  • Keith Devens is working on version 3.0 of his PHP XML-RPC library.  Here’s what he’s thinking about so far:

  • I’m making it even easier to build servers. You may be able to do it in one line of code, we’ll see Smiley winking
  • Include SSL support. I’ve gotten this request a few times. I’m planning to include a separate and optional method to make a connection which will use cURL and support SSL. Does it make sense to also support HTTP authentication?
  • You should never have to call XMLRPC_prepare yourself again.
  • I’m probably also going to include my “method not found” method, just to save you from having to write your own. Not that it’s hard, but it’s only about 3 additional lines in the library.

    • And yes, XML-RPC still matters.  Even in a world of SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and buckets of other acronyms and standards.  Sometimes you just want to get something really simple done.

  • Polar Opposites

    Today/this evening I did two things in addition to homework that appear on the surface to be polar opposites.  First, I bought Java Development with Ant by Erik Hatcher and that crazy guy Steve Loughran [blog].  Second, I started playing with WSDL.EXE, which generates stubs for C# code from a WSDL file.

    I thought that while I was banging my head against the wall getting Apache Axis to behave, I would learn how to use Ant properly.  At the same time I’ve got some ideas that just can’t wait, so I’m going to be fiddling around in C# for awhile too.  It’s damn near Java anyway. (wink wink, nudge nudge)

    Oh yeah, I also snagged a 512MB PC-133 DIMM for $49.  How cool is that?

  • WebServices.Org points to WSDL Explorer by IBM AlphaWorks.  The WSDL explorer is available online here.  Here’s a blurb from the pointer:

    Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer is a Web application that displays WSDL files, generates views of operations, allows invocation of operations, and allows viewing of sample message flow. It enables users to compare and contrast Web services without going through the time and trouble of importing them into a heavy development tool. WSDL Explorer provides the ability to browse WSDL files, and it offers immediate access to Web service operations.

  • Doug Kaye:

    Iterative Improvement. In a web-services world it’s often less expensive to modify a service than it is to redesign and reprint a paper form. Does this mean we can relax the usual fanatacism for the top-down design of our business processes? Can we actually plan for a more iterative design approach? In terms of version control, adding an output XML element or attribute is almost always backwards compatible, something that’s been elusive with older technologies. Just something I’ve been thinking about.

    Think about that for a minute.

  • Keith Davens:

    Joel Spolsky:

    Most of the RSS subscribers are whacking me every hour, which is actually costing me cash money in excess bandwidth charges. How can I set it up so they only visit once a day? Is this an RSS option? I rarely post more than once or twice a day. Maybe I should change the RSS feed to just include headlines with links.

    This is why I click “check all feeds” in my own aggregator when I feel like catching up. It runs for about a minute checking my 80+ feeds, and then displays all changes to me. I think it’s rude to be hitting someone’s site every hour automatically for no reason.

    I’ve modified the way I do things so that I try to take a few minutes break from whatever I’m doing, if possible, about once an hour to catch up on my RSS feed.  I guess I’m a freak.  I use Radio’s RSS aggregator, so I’m stuck with aggregating once an hour since I’m on the road a lot.

    I’m a freak, though I understand about bandwidth issues.

    RSS-RPC?  RSS Services?

    The thing that bothers me is that I have to download everyone’s entire RSS file in order to parse it and figure out what’s new based on timestamps and stuff.  Wouldn’t an interactive RSS make a lot of sense?  Some way to ping someone’s weblog via XML-RPC or SOAP, pass in a date/time, and get back an array of entries in well-formed RSS of only the new entries.

  • Russell Beattie: Three Ingredients.

  • IBM developerWorks: Plug a Swing-based development tool into Eclipse: How to integrate a Swing editor into the Eclipse Platform.

    Learn how to integrate a stand-alone Swing-based editor into the Eclipse Platform as a plug-in. Using simple techniques, you can share resources between the Swing tool, the Eclipse Platform, and various SWT widgets — and these resources can communicate through mutual awareness. Tool vendors who want to bring Eclipse-based development tools to market with a minimal amount of re-coding will also find this article helpful. [via Linux Today]

  • JXTA Protocols 1.0 released. [via Hack the Planet]

  • Hardware Analysis posts an article about building a high-performance web server.  It gets mentioned on Slashdot.  The site now fluctuates between taking five minutes to load or not responding.  Yeah, internet.

  • Greg Klebus found a sweet case for the Via Eden:

    I ran accross this and fell in love at first sight with the design. Just imagine a computer in a semi-transparent blue plastic breadbox from IKEA ($6.50). Way cool! If not for the nasty CD-RW drive, it would be a perfectly clean design (very iMacish).

    Matt—if you’re reading this—I’d definitely go for this solution if I had a spare case-less VIA Eden.

    Speaking of Matt and his VIA Eden: he seems to have lost the onboard network card due to power outage. What a bad luck. It would be a disaster for me and my Shuttle SV25, as having 2 NICs (onboard and PCI) is crucial for my box being a proxy server for other machines at home.

    That’s a really slick case that doesn’t look like it would take much time to reproduce.  I should just take my Eden to Ikea some day and see what kind of fun things it fits in.  Someday 🙂

  • I’m a little confused about the right sequence of steps that I need to take in order to get Apache Axis to run successfully on my Linux server.  I’ve installed the JDK, Jakarta, and Axis.  The happyaxis.jsp page is quite happy, but I can’t build any projects using the Axis libraries.

    I have followed the documentation to the best of my abilities.  I’m a little dissapointed at the docs, as I wasn’t really able to figure out what was going on.  I’d be referred around from one fragment of documentation to another, not sure what to do.  If I ever do get things figured out, I’ll try to post/publish/donate a howto or something like that.

    Am I the only one frustrated with installing Axis?  I tried Gump, but ran into some problems getting it to run.  I’m probably misinterpreting something in the Apache docs.  Oh well.

  • Red Hat 8.0 Server

    I installed Red Hat 8.0 as a server configuration last night on a PII350 with 128MB of RAM.  A nice install of server stuff without X, Gnome, KDE, and other stuff I don’t need on a server ran about 900MB.  Not too bad.

  • Dane Carlson pointed to a bunch of cool stuff yesterday and today, including a color pallete chooser, The Art of Software Development at DevShed, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers, and Bloggers Proverbs.

  • Greg Reinacker: Web Services and Schema Validation.

    There was a lot of talk at the DevCon about writing your web service interface first in WSDL, and then implementing it in code.  This is in contrast to the method that the current tools tend to encourage; for example, with VS.NET, you can write your code, decorate the methods with [WebMethod], and automatically generate the WSDL.  I wholeheartedly agree with the first way – define your interface first, and implement second.  There are things you can do this way that the tools just won’t do for you.

    I agree, writing your WSDL first, generating stubs, and then filling them out makes tons of sense.  Read the rest of Greg’s post for more about restricting values, validating and all kinds of fun stuff.

  • Mikel Maron pointed to OEOne, a company with a pretty slick looking dashboard/desktop that looks slick and simple.  They have a standalone version which is an everything-in-the-box kind of thing.  They also have a desktop version which can run on top of RedHat 7.x, Mandrake 8.2 or 9.0.  Unfortunately it doesn’t run on Red Hat 8.0.  I’m booting up my Red Hat 7.x box to check it out.

    The install procedure starts out pretty easily (as root):

    $ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ | sh

    or

    $ links -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh

    Then a pretty easy to use wizard pops up.  It walks you through setup, detects what packages you have, which packages it might have to delete (double check this!) and what packages it is going to install.  It installs a modded Mozilla 1.0 among other things, and the full install totalled just under 100MB for me.  It’s currently slurping RPMs over the net.

    Crunch, crunch, crunch.  Install, install, install.

    It changed a lot of stuff on my system, I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone who’s already using Linux.

  • OnLamp: Beginning Python for Bioinformatics.  This article wins todays prize of wtf title of the day.  It makes sense, Python seems like such a ‘glue’ language to me at times, but at first glance, I didn’t understand why Python and bioinformatics were in the same sentance.

    Bioinformatics, the use of computers in biological research, is the newest wrinkle on one of the oldest pursuits–trying to uncover the secret of life. While we may not know all of life’s secrets, at the very least computers are helping us understand many of the biological processes that take place inside of living things. In fact, the use of computers in biological research has risen to such a degree that computer programming has now become an important and almost essential skill for today’s biologists.