Category: xml and web 2.0

Had a quick look at the range of very interesting opensource projects Novell are working on. Some great stuff, specially ifolder. Edd Dumbill has a huge review on his blog worth reading. Also mentions the nice looking F-Spot which seems to support FOAF depiction data. I dont know how it compares to my favourate photostudio which fully supports EXIF data. But we shall see…

How on earth do you setup a page to post over XMLRPC using the Apache XMLRPC classes?

Miles found me this page but I swear, I can not get it to work at all. Anyway I tried to adopt the blojsom admin edit plugin to fit the purpose but still cant get that working either. So I'm stuck now…

Been doing more research into the whole problem.
apache xml-rpc metaWeblog api

Miles solves it…
Variables needed for it work, title, description, category. Stick these in html form elements with a form method=”post”, action=”thexmlrpc.jsp” and submit button and your away. Oh dont forget the Apache XMLRPC classes.

<%@ page import="org.apache.xmlrpc.*,
                java.util.*"%>

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >

< !DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en" >

< head >

    < title >Blogging using XMLRPC from a JSP based webclient< /title >

< /head >



<%
// Grab the variables from the form before.
String title = request.getParameter("title");
String description = request.getParameter("description");
String category = request.getParameter("category");
String blogServer = "http://something/blojsom/xmlrpc/blog";

// This is crap as we should really not use a hard-coded path
//String errorUrl = "http://a/url/that/you/post/from";
// Slightly less crap...
String errorUrl = request.getHeader("Referer");

Vector params=null;

if ((title == null) || (title.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(errorUrl ));
    }
if ((description == null) || (description.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }
if ((category == null) || (category.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }

// Create XML RPC Client object
XmlRpcClient xmlrpc=new XmlRpcClient(blogServer);

Hashtable structContents=new Hashtable();
structContents.put("category", category);
structContents.put("title", title);
structContents.put("description", description);
Boolean Booly = new Boolean(true);

params=new Vector();
// Dummy for blojsom
params.add("1");
params.add("username");
params.add("password");
params.add(structContents);
// Publish this post
params.add(Booly);

String created = (String)xmlrpc.execute("metaWeblog.newPost",params);
out.println("< p >This is the result: " + created + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the title: " + title + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the description: " + description + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the category: " + category + ".< /p >");

%>

< /body >

< /html >

Still trying to get my head around Velocity and its amazing possibilites. Specially when considering joining velocity with cocoon. It shoud mean I can tap into some nice jar files for example reading icals, pdfs and images. Then turning them into some kind simple tree structure for cocoon to consume happly.

As most of my students keep on bugging about teaching PHP. I will kind of explain why VM or Velocity is the way forward and ever so different from JSP and PHP. Actually no need, its all done for me. Velocity Design. JSP vs VM, explains really well. Still cant find anything about L though. On the otherside its well worth checking out Java servlets, its the reason why I keep recommending Java servers to people. Resin, Jetty, Jboss and Tomcat in that order… Well worth reading the story behind Jboss, I dont agree with alot of it but its an interesting read anyway if quite long. Also come on guys theres a reason why Sun, IBM, Netscape, ATG, Apache, etc support Java servlets…

XML.com has made some changes it would seem. With the topics ranging from managing personal media collections to XMLTV. Should be interesting to see the results of the changes, as they were doing quite well already. Maybe the webservices.xml.com will be more business like.

XML is well on its way to becoming a mature, ubiquitous technology. The pace of standardization has not slowed, but the time where applications took a back seat to new core technologies is coming to an end. At XML.com we want to focus more on the application space, particularly personal information management, a vibrant area of XML application development. To that end, today Kendall Clark begins a new column, “Hacking the Library”, which will focus on problems of personal information, especially those related to the digital media lifestyle.

Seem to be missing out on somethings recently…
Multimodal Interaction on the Web, an introduction to Friend of a friend vocabulary and XML 2003 diary. Got some reading to do…

Was flying through Openoffice.org today looking for enough information to contribute to the National Archives Pronom application. And came across this nice openoffice ebook which is free to download and read online.

What is Pronom? Well let them tell you…

PRONOM is a database of information about the technical dependencies upon which access to electronic records may rely. It contains information about the file formats in which electronic records may be stored, the software products required to create, render and migrate these formats, and the vendors who develop these products. It includes product support life cycle information, to facilitate technology watch within digital archives. The PRONOM database can be searched online, and reports produced in a variety of formats. The system currently holds details of, 550 file formats, 250 software products, and 100 vendors, and records are being added on a regular basis. We also actively encourage the submission of new information for inclusion on PRONOM, and an online submission form is provided for this purpose. The website also includes details of our plans for significant future developments to both the content and the functionality of the system.

PRONOM was developed by The National Archives' Digital Preservation Department, as a tool to support TNA's own digital archive. However, we hope and anticipate that PRONOM will also provide a valuable resource for the wider digital preservation community. As such, we very much welcome feedback on both the current version of PRONOM and our future plans. All feedback should be sent to: pronom@nationalarchives.gov.uk

More information can be found under the menu on the left side of PRONOM Go check it out and contribute more information.

Been a little slow on moving on this one, but at long last the Office 2003 XML schemas are available for download. I have to wonder why its a exe though? What was wrong with zip?

Seen this on xml.com. Pretty much covers what I already knew about authoring xml. However there are some interesting points.

A shame, too, that while Microsoft has brought XML into the Word and Excel products, Outlook does not permit XML document creation. – Yes they couldnt even put in ical support.
Udell suggested that a way of doing this might be through using style as a back door. Many people are willing to spend a long time on getting the look of a document right, but not be willing to spend that time on metadata creation. Udell suggested that by providing metadata-significant styles, authoring tools creators could encourage more preservation of context in communication through the carrot of creating beautiful documents. – Now thats interesting, I'd never thought of that. I've used implied structures.
Interesting talk about Adobe, as it seems there starting to get there smart documents and network publishing together now. Will have to look into it later on, but I like what i'm hearing…
The smart documents contain three elements: the document part, including XSL-FO and SVG for presentation; the forms part, using XSLT and JavaScript for validation and adaptation; and metadata, using Adobe's XMP (a restricted RDF). – More under the blog.The XML documents can be filled out through Adobe Acrobat Reader – Now thats a super smart move by Adobe, weve already seen SVG being trojan'ed onto peoples machines through Acrobat reader. Now its the Smart documents time.

The starting point
Xforms examples, yum yum…

Recently Microsoft have been feeling the pressure from the open source community. They have started opening the office 2003 file formats. Then today I caught two different arcticles about related areas.
The push behind Microsoft's Office moves and Microsoft opens FAT file format. Linux and Windows co-existing? All from Microsoft?

But then again there not doing everything nicely…

Been looking at xopus once again. The demos are useful as I never knew Xopus actually supported xml editing to a xml schema. Will need to try it out once again i think. Didnt know Xopus wasnt opensource, or maybe I was thinking of Bitflux. Also can someone please tell me what is bitflux's CMS popoon? It sounds like cocoon converted into cocoon. I think this says it all Popoon basiert auf Ideen von Apaches Cocoon.
More information on slides and presentations and the wiki is a reminder why I or someone needs to write a RelaxNG to Xml schema xslt.

I spent a bit of time this weekend getting my image gallary off the ground using Cocoon's imagedirectory generater pipeline. Which works but doesnt go quite as far as I first hoped.

First up, I expected cocoon to generate image previews for me in some kind of way, dont know how it would be possible but I kinda of expected it anyway. Then I also expected the generater to support EXIF so I could pull data out of the photo, such as when it was photographed, etc. But no good. Anyway I've been looking into the area of EXIF again and come up with a bunch of links for next time I got time to look at this area in more depth.

Stuffware Photo Studio – Free and deals with all types of photo and movie metadata the best of the lot.
The specs for EXIF and the Camera file system.
Jhead's EXIF to XML complete with a whole host of useful links too.
W3c's Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP note.
OpenEXIF.
metadata extraction in java, also loving the look of Drew's photo gallary. Surely there has to be a way to intergrate this into cocoon, as its just a jar file?

Oh just a quick mention that the Stuffware Photo studio is the bomb and I'm loving it. Just wish I could find a way of cocoon reading the EXIF data and the embeded jpg thumbnail rather than me making another directory for thumbnails! Yes that really sucks bad… Made my feelings be known on the cocoon wiki