Friday, February 16, 2007
XML.com Newsletter
XML.com Xtra!
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The Email for XML.com Subscribers
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Dear Reader,
Welcome to another issue of XML.com.
Bob DuCharme -- still one of my favorite techie authors: does anyone write
tech prose as clear as Bob? -- returns this week with the first of a two-part series on RDFa,
which is the W3C's latest attempt to mate a general purpose metadata language (RDF) with, well, the
Web, or at least with XHTML. RDFa is interesting, since it solves a problem some of us were
really bothered by a few years back -- basically, how to relate metadata to web resources in a
clean way.
Kendall's Theorem (which I never get tired of repeating) is that everything about software takes
longer to mature than anyone ever thinks. That means that RDFa may not be
too late after all.
Introducing RDFa
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/14/introducing-rdfa.html
Continuing the new trend to longer, chattier newsletters, I thought I'd mention five cool things
that flew through my Attention Zone this week:
1. Milk -- well, you just have to see it to understand (beware: you need
Flash to make sense of this):
http://www.milk.dk/
This is not the first time I wished I were a citizen of Denmark.
2. Elixir, a port of Rails's ActiveRecord to Python's SQLAlchemy, which was already my all-time
fave way to deal with SQL and relational data from Python or any other
language. Excuse the vernacular, but Elixir is The Shit!
http://elixir.ematia.de/
3. XML.com columnist and HTTP guru Joe Gregorio (plus co-author Bill de hOra) releases what
appears to be the penultimate draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol. Elliotte Rusty Harold
recently claimed that APP was gonna be a big hit in 2007; I think he's spot-on.
In fact, I think APP will end up having a bigger impact on the Web than Atom itself.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-13.txt
4. mod_wsgi: I've been pushing WSGI on XML.com because I think the Python response to the
proliferation of web frameworks is inherently interesting, but also interestingly different from
the Ruby or Perl response. Of course, it hasn't yet been as successful as the Ruby response, and
probably won't be, but that's beside the point.
Though not yet officially released, mod_wsgi, an Apache mod for the 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2 versions,
lets you run WSGI apps behind Apache, which somehow became everyone's *second* favorite HTTP
server at some point in the last year or so. How did *that* happen?
At any rate, if you do Python web stuff, you should know about WSGI; and if you do WSGI, mod_wsgi
sounds like a very welcome development.
5. soaplib: Finally there's a real, modern, good SOAP library for Python. It even produces and
consumes WSDL. OK, sure, SOAP, WSDL, Web Services, SOA -- these are all *clearly* evil, but some
of us still have to deal with them in our Day Jobs. Until I attain a state of RESTful Purity,
soaplib will make a big, happy difference to me in my Other Job.
http://trac.optio.webfactional.com/
OK, so a lot of that was Python-specific: sue me for loving Python! :>
As always, thanks for reading.
Kendall Clark
kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com
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