|
|
 | Friday, October 19, 2001 |
Wired: "Apple on Tuesday will unveil a new portable electronic device that allows people to listen to digital music files away from the computer.. The device -- called the iPod -- can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system." 
 AP: "German authorities have issued an international arrest warrant for a Moroccan on charges that he helped plan and prepare the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prosecutors said Friday."
Scoble is blogging the PopTech conference.
Amy Wohl on the value of endorsements.
 Kevin Werbach asks, on the Decentralization list, if his theory that SOAP is for big corporations and XML-RPC for independent developers, is true.
Kevin is one of my inspirations for wanting to get corporations on the record about their use of XML-RPC. My impression is quite different from Kevin's. Corporations do development with people who are much like you and me (in fact lots of corporate developers read Scripting News). I hear from people inside corporations all the time who use appropriate technology based its merits, not on whether a BigCo is pushing it (aside from that MS is not pushing SOAP, they're pushing a soup of confusing and ill-specified stuff).
As a co-developer of both XML-RPC and SOAP, I have no stake in either protocol winning. I like them both. My software supports both. But I do not want to see this world divided between the respected and the disrespected. I give developers at MS and IBM no more credit for doing useful stuff than I do a random developer at a company I've never heard of. Actually, based on my experience, it's more likely that a lone developer will do better work than his counterpart at a BigCo. You can be closer to users when you're at a small company, and you respect customers more because you depend on them, in a real way, to keep your business going.
One more thing -- SOAP and XML-RPC are almost 100 percent politics. The technology is very thin, and by design, easy to implement. These are Emancipation Proclamations for free-thinking developers everywhere. No one cares if you work for a BigCo or not. Roll up your sleeves, build some distributed systems, exercise your right to use any development or runtime environment you want, and force the vendors to compete on the merits of their products. If BigMoney makes better software, they deserve to win. If the past is any guide, they don't stand a chance.
I commented on this in a recent DaveNet, but no one picked it up as far as I can tell. "The economics of software favor small independent developers." Double-click on that, and look at the ways the Big's try to undermine the Little's, but it's mostly bullshit. Where are the standards the Big's were cooking up in the early 90s. They're dead, swept away by SMTP, POP, HTTP, HTML. The tech renegades at MS fully understood this, but the industry hasn't caught onto this yet, and most of Microsoft hasn't either.
W3JMailServer has an XML-RPC interface.
Adam Curry rants eloquently about email.
BTW, we have the problem licked. We're using a new system at UserLand, it replaces our largely email-based internal communication system. It's a combination of instant messaging and outlining. I'm sure it's not for everyone. But for workgroups whose product is thought (like my company), making an investment in human-to-human communication is a pure money-maker. It's interesting that Adam exploded on this at this time. He's not NDA'd (yet) on the new product.
BTW, this new communication platform will be open. The connections are all implemented in SOAP 1.1 and XML-RPC (your choice). The documents are passed between computers in OPML. So if you do a text tool or outliner, just be sure you support OPML and encourage the people who work on the OSes and scripting environments to bake in XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1. That's it.
Specs: XML-RPC, SOAP 1.1, OPML.
On this day last year I wrote my favorite DaveNet of all time.
Frank Zappa sang La la la la la la la -- Nice lady! Don't ask me why this is running through my head. It just is. (I know I know, it was actually Flo and Eddie who sang that, the vocalists who joined The Mothers after disbanding The Turtles.) "Watch out where the Huskies go and don't you eat that yellow snow!"
Sometimes Donnelan just cracks me up.
|
|
| Last update: Saturday, October 20, 2001 at 7:15 AM Eastern. |
Dave Winer 
Sep
Nov
|
