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.

The Cure for XML in Web 2.0?

Earlier, I blogged about the Pain of XML in Web 2.0. I alluded to not being happy with the answer I ended up with. I'm happy to say that I'll finally be talking about a possible solution. As you see here, I have submitted a paper for the Balisage 2010 Conference entitled Where XForms meets the glass: Bridging between data and interaction design along with Charles Wiecha and Rahul Akolkar.

Here is the abstract:

XForms offers a model-view framework for XML applications. Some developers take a data-centric approach, developing XForms applications by first specifying abstract operations on data and then gradually giving those operations a concrete user interface using XForms widgets. Other developers start from the user interface and develop the MVC model only as far as is needed to support the desired user experience. Tools and design methods suitable for one group may be unhelpful (at best) for the other. We explore a way to bridge this divide by working within the conventions of existing Ajax frameworks such as Dojo.

Interested? Let me know and we can get a review copy of the paper to you. I have talked to many clients that want to integrate their meta data driven XML dominant data to the Web 2.0 work with DOJO and run into the impedance mismatch wall. Hopefully that wall will be coming down soon.

BTW, if you'd like to attend this great conference to hear about this topic and many others on the jam packed agenda, here is a great link to use to convince your management to let you join us in Montreal.