Saturday, October 30, 1999

Dan Shafer: Solving the next big headache for web builders. "The XML-RPC spec is the soul of brevity, occupying only a few pages when printed. The spec is also comprehensible, even to those whose background isn't in programming."

I had no idea this article was coming yesterday when I posted the survey about the Builder.Com conference in New Orleans in December. Chalk it up to synchronicity.

Reading Dan's piece, I want to thank him for the evangelism, but I have to correct some of the statements, because they could lead to misunderstandings.

9/25/99: Dave's History of SOAP.

We're testing a new server running NT 2000. Help us test its performance. Click on this link. You have our eternal gratitude.

Flutterby: Objects and APIs to What End? Interesting. Dan Lyke is making the case I made to Apple in 1990, when they said all word processors could support a common scripting interface. I said it'll never work because no WP views the world the same way as any other WP. It was a marketing person's dream. What we want is what Dan wants, easy ways to drive other processes, only this time, what's new for us in the GUI world, is that we do it over a worldwide network.

At some time, it would be great if Lyke tried to look at XML-RPC as a good thing, he might discover that it's fairly well designed and not too object oriented. We don't adopt Microsoft's religion wholesale, or Apple's, or Unix's. Or Tcl, Perl, Java, JavaScript, AppleScript, PHP, Cold Fusion, Frontier or Python. Or Apache, IIS, WebSTAR, or inetd. And if it matures well, you'll be able to drive Quark, DreamWeaver, PhotoShop, Access, Excel, and all KDE apps. That gives writers, designers and photographers the power we want to give them. It's about bridges, not architectures. Roadways not cathedrals.

BTW, try taking AppleScript away from a Quark user to learn about the dollar value of cross-application scripting. It's a business thing, not a religious thing. (Interestingly, a couple of major Linux magazines are actually Quark apps running on Macs.) If apps aren't scriptable, human beings do more work, or less, depending on how you look at it.

Today is "Dan Day" on Scripting News! Dan Shafer, Dan Lyke and now here's a picture of Dan Gillmor's class at Hong Kong University.