Distributed Computing at WWW9
Saturday, July 10, 1999 by Dave Winer.
An announcement 
I've been named co-chair for the Developer's Day "Distributed Computing on the Web" track at WWW9 in Amsterdam next May.
http://www9.org/w9-call-developer.html
My fellow chair is Annrai O'Toole of Iona, an expert on CORBA. We're in the Call for Participation stage, which means that if you have work related to Distributed Computing on the Web that you would like to present to developers at WWW9, now is the time to start thinking. I'm a newbie at chairing for a technical conference, but I'm looking forward to the experience, and creating an informative and productive experience for the people attending and speaking at WWW9 on this subject.
XML-RPC and scripting
Earlier this week we announced a strategic partnership with Digital Creations, the company behind Zope, the deep and open source web content management software on Linux.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/990707/tx_digital_1.html
We're actively developing websites on Linux that run in Zope. These sites run in a relational database. It's quite different from our object database environment on Windows and Mac. I love Zope for what it makes possible but still I can't wait to have Frontier on Linux. I want to spawn a hundred thousand compatible servers. Syndicated content rendered thru preferences, instantly distributed. Indexed facts and ideas.To me this is what the web will look like, at a technical level, in its next stage.
This deal means that all the stuff we create will flow thru Zope too because we're making the open source investment; making sure that Zope's XML-RPC interfaces work and perform well. This is the first deal we wanted to do because the Zope philosophy and the Frontier philosophy are so close. "The More the Merrier!" we both say emphatically, so if you are your company are doing distributed applications over the Internet we hope you'll check out XML-RPC, the common protocol that we're building on:
We plan to post new specs for a couple of protocols in the next few weeks, one to enable a "network computing" model for desktop text editing tools (word processors, outliners, spreadsheets, etc.) and another for a distributed user preferences system. We will post pointers on Scripting News when these specs are available for review and comment.
InfoWorld on Manila
Sadly, my friend Jeff Walsh is leaving InfoWorld to become an editorial writer at Macromedia.
As his swan song, Jeff wrote a wonderful piece about our upcoming Manila product:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/990712hnuserland.xml
This is a great article because it links to another friend, Jamis MacNiven, the editor of BucksWoodside.Com.
This is the way of the Internet. Storytelling and friends helping friends. Right on!
It's all the same thing.
Namaste y'all..
Have a great weekend!