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Tonight's song: Creatures of Love. "It's okay to be afraid when the blue sparks hit your brain. We can love one another, I've been told that it's okay." A new section for the BDG. "That there's a need for [A Busy Developer's Guide] surprises some, considering that the S in SOAP stands for Simple. In fact, SOAP is simple, as this document shows, even though coaxing its simplicity from the myriad of related specs and RFCs requires a patience and dedication that most BDs don't have." Dan Anderson: "While technologies such as SOAP require major players like IBM and Microsoft to foster their growth, there is a difference between riding in the car and being stuffed in the trunk." Craig Burton: "I am still very puzzled about a post by Dave Winer’s Scripting News last Saturday." Craig, SOAP is what it is. We have lots of forks in our code base. Mac and Windows. Frontier and Radio. XML-RPC and SOAP. Lots of little irritating differences. Two buttons on a Windows mouse, no Tools (yet!) in Frontier. Named params in SOAP, and by-order params in XML-RPC. That's the price we pay for diversity. It's worth it. Reminder, tomorrow is Buy-A-Programmer-Lunch Day. And don't forget to tell them about the BDG.  Doc: "As I've experienced before with people who know traditional markets intimately, markets are conversations delivers the news impact of skies are blue." PHP Builder: XML-RPC as a standard for distributed processing. News.Com: Will the refresh button become obsolete? JavaWorld: Clean up your wire protocol with SOAP. At 10AM we started an almost two-hour conference call with the leading lights of the soapbuilders list and some newbies. I yearn to get back to writing apps. I'm not a good standards body type person. But there seems to be a lot of support for BDG. Maybe that's all we need. I'm going to take a break and a walk and think think think. In the meantime check out Jake's SOAP Journal. It's authoritative! My break lasted until 6:40PM. I'm going to start a fresh pot of coffee and get back to xmlStorageSystem. It's good for the Internet. The docs are writing themselves in my head. It will be good for my friends, the soap-newbies. It will be good for my friends the Frontier developers. 9/12/99: "There is no single operating system, nor is there a single programming or scripting language that suits every developer or every application." 7/7/99: "Having witnessed the Internet turned into a battlefield, and assessing that at least half of the blame for that belongs to Microsoft, I am in no mood for another contentious, irrelevant do-or-die battle. This time around either Microsoft grows up and learns to be the statesman of the industry that it could be, or we'll do a Linus, and keep doing the work we love.." xmlStorageSystem  Even though there's confusion, we're still shipping SOAP apps, the things that others call Web Services. You gotta know we were ready for this. For example, we shipped a SOAP interface for MailToTheFuture over the weekend. The work was mostly in docs and a table of glue scripts for Frontier and Radio scripters. All we had to do to implement the SOAP interface was put an address to the table of XML-RPC handlers in user.soap.rpcHandlers. One line of code turned our XML-RPC support into SOAP support. Now, the next SOAP app is called xmlStorageSystem. It's like HailStorm with one key difference. Instead of being private, the content you store is public. It's publishing. All our interfaces will be publicly documented and clonable. This is not a business model. And like the MTTF interfaces, the hard work is already done. The code for xmlStorageSystem is the back-end of an already-deployed Radio feature called upstreaming. I'm simplifying the interfaces, writing docs, testing, etc. The delivery will be in the same form as MTTF release -- docs for non-UserLand developers, and a glue table for people who work in our environment. BTW, what falls out of this, almost for free, is a low-tech SOAP-based pub-sub system, also implemented and documented. There's no time like now to move, before the BigCo moves, let's get some software deployed, let the boostrap proceed to the next step, before the FUD gets too heavy. Good morning BDG fans! It's still not frozen. Microsoft has not reviewed the spec, as far as we know, in any official capacity. We want confirmation that the subset the BDG defines will work with Microsoft's SOAP implementations. It spooks me that they will not say one way or the other. I remember the XML support in Word, useless as a basis for interop, but the hopes were there anyway, prior to its release. I'm concerned that we're pouring effort down a bottomless hole, and that's gotta stop sometime, and if it's not going to yield interop with MS products, we should stop now. What a shame it would be to have wasted so much effort only to find out that there was never any hope of interop. It could happen. On the other hand, after a rocky start the soapbuilders community has been wonderful to work with. We're getting to know each other, and the goals seem to match. And there's some good news this morning. Fredrik Lundh of PythonWare says he supports the BDG. This is a continuation of a long friendship between the Python community and UserLand. We're very pleased to get their support, and look forward to many more cool things we can do to help each other. This is the true spirit of the Internet, imho. "Johnny's in the basement mixin up the medicine, I'm on the pavement thinkin about the government."
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