O’Reilly unleashed several new articles today:
Is There a Consensus Web Services Stack? by Kendall Clark:
What Marx said of world history — that it occurs the first time as tragedy, the second as farce — is increasingly true of conversations in the XML development community. Conversation among XML developers has grown increasingly ossified. Permanent topics of conversation return — never, it appears, to be fully repressed — over and over: the ins and outs of namespaces, the nature of resources and representations, why SOAP is sweetness-and-light or pure evil, the ideal simplifying refactor of XML itself, and so on. And, each time the cycle repeats itself, the positions grow more shrill, more caricatured, and less interesting. I suppose that it’s possible that someone eventually learn something from all of this; more likely, people give up the hope of learning something and stop paying attention.
Building Metadata Applications with RDF [and RDFlib] by Bob DuCharme:
The real test of any technology’s value is what kinds of tasks are easier with it than without it. If I hear about some new technology, I’m not going to learn it and use it unless it saves me some trouble. Well, being a bit of a geek, I might play with it a bit, but I’m going to lose interest if I don’t eventually see tangible proof that it either makes new things possible or old things easier.
Simple XML Processing With elementtree by Uche Ogbuji:
Fredrik Lundh, well known in Python circles as “the effbot“, has been an important contributor to Python and to PyXML. He has also developed a variety of useful tools, many of which involve Python and XML. One of these is elementtree, a collection of lightweight utilities for XML processing. elementtree is centered around a data structure for representing XML. As its name implies, this data structure is a hierarchy of objects, each of which represents an XML element. The focus is squarely on elements: there is no zoo of node types. Element objects themselves act as Python dictionaries of the XML attributes and Python lists of the element children. Text content is represented as simple data members on element instances. elementtree is about as pythonic as it gets, offering a fresh perspective on Python-XML processing, especially after the DOM explorations of my previous columns.
I’ll be reading all of these articles later this evening after some coding for schoolwork gets done.
