Day: November 11, 2002

Jeremy Allaire:

Today, Macromedia launched Macromedia Contribute, a powerful new desktop application that aims to unleash web publishing for everyone, while providing control to web professionals ultimately responsible for websites and applications.

What amazes me more is that Macromedia was able to take Drumbeat 2000, a painful to use development environment, and turn it on to something useful (Dreamweaver UltraDev).

I just took a peek at the overview video, and Contribute looks pretty slick.  Browse -> Edit -> Publish.  It seems like a good combination of Manilla, Mozilla, and FrontPage.  I haven’t viewed source yet on what it produces, but it looks like the overview relied on tables.

Brian Graf:

As of today, I am finally allowed to talk publically about what I have been working on for the past six months. Here is the press release and an early article.

In all fairness, I had really very little to do with this. Most of my contributions were related to getting Dotfuscator translated into all of the languages that Visual Studio ships in. We turned over our first feature complete version three weeks after I was hired, so most of my stuff won’t be seen until a future version.

Congratulations to everyone at PreEmptive Solutions for a job well done.

Congrats!

There’s an interesting article going on over at Kuro5hin on current RSS problems and possible solutions:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web content syndication format based on XML 1.0. In the current implementation it’s a very capable format used to aggregate content from multiple news sources. The problem with this format is that the architecture on which it is deployed hasn’t changed in a while and places too much load onto the infrastructure. (e.g. Joel’s RSS problem)

In this article I try to point out different approaches to solve these problems and make RSS more suited to be used on mobile devices which are not always-on.

Charles Miller chimed in with all kinds of goodies including mod_gzip, NNTP advantages/disadvantages, server-level caching, and the Jabber possibilites.

I have managed to implement about 3/4 of the AggregatorAPI methods via XML-RPC in C#.  I don’t really know C#.  I have a book by Peter Drayton and others called C# essentials.  That and my Java/C++/Visual Studio experience is all that I’m drawing upon.  The testing app is quite ugly, but you’ll note that I can subscribe, unsubscribe, get stats on the last aggregator run, and get info for a specific feed.  I have to figure a few things out before I can implement the last few methods.

As soon as I can implement and test the other methods, I’ll release the C# source under a license that is compatable with the XML-RPC library, hopefully something BSD-style.  This might save other developers with implementation, they can just roll with it.  I should have some free time tomorrow to work on it.

I still have not had time to write up my experiences thus far.  One thing I will note: there’s a HUGE difference between http://127.0.0.1/RPC2 and http://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2.  I smacked myself for that one.