Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

There is a new JCP aiming to create a Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services. The proposal was sumitted by Sun and is supported (among others by) Jérôme Louvel, creator of the RESTlet Java framework.

Interesting Commentary:

Pete Layey:

I hope they don’t screw it up (see JAX-WS).

Marc Hadley: provides a code example of what he thinks the API might look like. Looks good from my point of view

Steve Loughran:

It seems to me the people who have a better idea of what to do are the Cocoon folk and Team Netkernel, not the WS projects. Yet I suspect it will be the latter is the most interested, because clearly REST is winning the battle for hearts and minds, at least outside the enterprise. The trouble is, work on WS too long and you get corrupted, you start thinking of methods and operations, not remote state.

Indeed, as we are building REST applications with Cocoon, adhering to or integrating this API is an interesting point to watch. Stefan Tilkov:

First, we asked why he (Marc Hadley) feels a REST-specific JSR is needed, i.e. why Servlets and JSPs are not enough. We also questioned the spec’s wording about low-level APIs, and how one would go about developing RESTful web apps without a deep understanding of HTTP issues and design patterns. Marc replied that while the current APIs provide broad support for HTTP, they leave a lot of work to the developer that could be automated in a higher level API

Contains lots of other good references and quotes.

Peter Senfon has written a quite elaborate roundup of word processing document converters. As a test case he used documents created with the ICE content management system that make heavy use of styles and provide a good use case for professional, production-ready documents. The converters under consideration were:

• The Open XML Translator - Works with styles, but slow. Superficially OK, but needs manual fine-tuning
• The Open Document Foundation's ACME376 plugin - "Verdict: I am increasingly inclined to treat this is an elaborate joke. Wake me up when there's some real code to try out."
• Sun's Word plugin - Looks interesting, but nothing yet to try out.

With the big players slowly moving to XML and structured document formats, a world where seamless automatic conversion between document fomats is possible, becomes imaginable.

Relationships that form and evolve on the web will be systematized, to they extent they can be, by an iterative process that combines grassroots participation with exploratory top-down design.

-- Jon Udell

Many of the social web applications we have seen in the last months are essentially about combining data from different domains. The true value in these applications is in the relationships they store. This is why I am so excited about Hagen Overdick's work at xenodot.

What started as yet another way to map XML storage in SQL databases quickly evolved into a new concept of information storage that focuses on relationships between data of different domains. Furthermore Hagen embeds concepts from REST architectures and workflow modeling into the data store, allowing us to build exciting new applications for a changing web.

xml.com features an interesting series on metrics for XML projects. So far most of the metrics focus on measuring XML schemas, not XML documents, but they are nevertheless worth reading:

• Element and Attribute Count
• Production Count
• XML Mapping Completeness Ratio
• XML Mapping Additions Ratio
• Structured Document Complexity Metric

Is anyone interested in writing an open-source alternative to the XMLmind XML Editor? If so, you should take a look at the xhtmlrenderer-framework, a Java library that allows rendering of XML and CSS.

A new release of the CSS-based, customizable WYSIWYG-XML-Editor XXE is out. The new release has following highlights:

• A configuration for DITA can be downloaded and installed using Options|Install Add-ons. More info. in this document.
• XXE has a more powerful table editor allowing to insert, copy, cut, paste, delete columns and rows, and allowing to increment or decrement the number of columns and the number of rows spanned by a cell.
• It is now possible to bind a command to the drag action as well as to the drop action. For example, using this new facility, it is possible to drag a DITA topic and drop it in a DITA map in order to create the corresponding topicref.
• Many enhancements are related to the CSS support in XXE.

A feature I like most about the new version is the support for Java 6 and its new GTK-Look-and-Feel.