A view from the road

It's been a very long time since I blogged. Twitter seems to keep me from thinking about blogging as often. Also, I've been hitting a second travel season.

Last week I was at Balisage 2010 talking about Web 2.0 and XML discussing how to introduce MVC frameworks into DOJO (and other Web 2.0 widget libraries) that provides all sorts of interesting value add to DOJO. Also once MVC is in place, XML centric models integrate better into the browser. Specifically I discussed Ubiquity XForms. The goal of this work would be a clean XML story of storage to mid tier joins and query that exposed REST/XML in its original form to the browser. This avoids having to write XML to POJO to JSON conversion routines for data that originates and is stored in XML - a common case in many clients I talk to.

This week, I've been between New York and New Jersey. I've been hearing about how the financial and insurance industries work with XML. I've heard about how enterprise content management systems and data storage systems are closely related. I've heard about how XQuery as a general purpose programming model on top of such data is being used. However, I've heard of challenges that relate in linking systems together. I've also heard that having "hybrid servers" that allow XML to bridge into relational and Java systems and JSON is important. Finally, I built a nice VMware based demo of FpML processing across DB2 pureXML and the WebSphere XML Feature Pack. If you're interested in seeing how to efficiently program native XML end to end (whether you're into FpML or not), let me know and we can arrange a demo.