Wednesday, January 13, 1999

We've started the negotiation between XML-RPC and WDDX. I exchanged lengthy emails this morning with Allaire CEO Jeremy Allaire, and this afternoon Simeon Simeonov, Allaire's WDDX architect posted a proposal on our discussion group. We're going to look at supporting both object serialization methods, the one in XML-RPC and WDDX. It's less than optimal, but that's life! I'm going to give it some thought before responding on the DG.

Dan Gillmor asks if you bought PacBell's ADSL service in the last few days. Here's your chance to be famous! Dan writes a column for the influential San Jose Mercury-News.

BTW, our investment in software that builds on fulltime net connections seems to have been a wise one. All those ADSL users coming on line! Hmmmm. Tasty!

Ross Nelson, the author of the HTML-Refresh IETF spec, posts a message on our DG, explaining why he didn't go with W3C.

John Dvorak: Death to Beige PCs.

Apple: $152 million quarterly profit.

Builder.com: Drumbeat 2000 Demo.

Press release: TAG '99.

ScriptMeridian: Regex 2.0.

Allaire: WDDX FAQ. "XML-RPC mechanisms, such as DataChannel's WebBroker, are focused on providing a full distributed object protocol using XML and HTTP. Alternatively, WDDX is focused on providing a simple, light-weight data exchange mechanism for Web programming languages. However, it is straightforward to layer an RPC style capability on top of WDDX/HTTP based interactions. A number of developers are doing this already, and we expect standard semantics to emerge to support this kind of application of WDDX."

On XML.COM, Lisa Rein describes the difference between XML-RPC and WDDX. "Unlike XML RPC, WDDX does not rely on remote procedure calls, but it does seek to describe distributed objects using XML." To this I would add, we could easily unbundle the object serialization part of XML-RPC. It's easier to go backward than it is to go forward.

{mainresponder.discuss.cowskulllink ("Allaire: Annotated WDDX DTD. This appears to be the closest thing to a spec they have. We can certainly study this to see if we can bridge to their format. I'm also still looking for a live server that talks WDDX in any fashion. Click on the cow skull to comment.", 2078)}

WebDeveloper: Just one more acronym, page 3. "Nor does [WDDX] use the elegant, but complex, set of similar technologies that have emerged to make it easier to communicate between different object-based systems by passing remote procedure calls (RPC) as XML. These solve different problems than WDDX." Pardon me, but that's a crock. Our object serialization formats are actually quite similar.

WebDeveloper: A Deeper Look at WDDX.

The Bay Area Cold Fusion User's Group meets tomorrow at Macromedia in SF to talk about WDDX.

Jesse Berst: Superfast cablemodems.

Hey! Our XML Syntax Checker app still works.

News.com: Oracle to announce VC fund. $100 million.

What happens to domain names used to promote movies? News.com has an interesting story about www.inandout.com.