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.

WWW2010/FutureWeb Conference Summary

I had the opportunity to attend the Future Web part of the WWW2010 Conference this past week in Raleigh, NC. This conference was quiet amazing both in the scope/influence and the fact that it was in my hometown.

I was able to hear some technical giants like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Danah Boyd and Doc Searls. I was able to meet up with many people locally (including Paul Jones) as well as folks from across the world working to make the internet move into the future.

The content was as technical as it was social and political. While it's interesting to hear about the Semantic Web and HTML5 and all the cool new areas for search/data mining, it was equally valuable to hear about the impacts the Web is having on education, healthcare, and media to name a few. Also, I hear about the work of many of the conference attendees to change government processes for the better and how involved that can be with the web spanning countries in ways no other technology can/does.

Some reflections on the technical content:

1) Facebook was bashed (a lot). I actually learned that yet again, Facebook had opted me into sharing information without my understanding. The key take away from all of this bashing was that Facebook (and all web technologies) have become a critical part of our culture. The information we all are producing to create value for sites like Facebook/Twitter/etc needs to be treated with care. Marketing folks salivate at the opportunities that this community created content provides. However, just because we can share and use such data in ways that benefit our companies, we shouldn't assume we should.

2) Adobe/Apple was based (a lot). The value of open standards on the web is clear. Some of the stories shared by the panelists were quite interesting -- Talk about how the internet was just a radical idea that would never compete with the "serious networks" of the time prove how valuable standards can be and how they have and will continue to change the world.

3) There was a great presentation by Carl Malamud talking about "Rules for Radicals" that documented 10 rules to make large changes to government and technology, but the rules applied equally well - I can apply them to working within a large corporation. Note that while take aways #1 and #2 got a lot of press, the fact is there were many iPad's, Mac Books and Facebook borne meetups. Carl's presentation showed that we need to work to affect change within these communities. Here is a quick video summary of the rules.

4) I've had it on my TODO list for some time now to look at the building blocks of the Semantic web. I needed to understand how RDF/RDFa and SPARQL relate to XML and XQuery. I'm starting to form some opinions now based upon what I've heard at the conference and the work I've done this week to play with the technologies. I can say with certainty that this Web 3.0 (the web for machines vs. Web 2.0 which was the web for human) and its related technologies - RDF, SPARQL are not going away. I can also say that RDF/SPARQL doesn't compete with XML/XQuery. I can see that we'll need to bridge the gap between these worlds as we look to unleash not only the XML stored in many enterprises but also relational data. We'll also need to do this quickly as this world is moving fast and those people who don't embrace Web 3.0 will be as left behind as those that are still moving towards Web 2.0. An example of this speed that impressed me was the creation of a Facebook Open Graph Protocol vocabulary that was peer edited during a session on Thursday but then live by Friday. Amazing.

5) Twitter is a business tool. I've known this for some time and had success stories, but given the audience of this conference (passionate web technologists) I saw the value of Twitter magnified by at least an order of magnitude. Every academic attendee was communicating via Twitter. I used it to find the IBM attendees and collaborate with them in ways I'm sure I would have missed without Twitter. I used it to meet people I've never met before (even led to a lunch out with Doc Searls and Kathy Gill and another with a local company that is working with SIP technologies). If it wasn't for twitter, I'd say the value of the collaboration at this conference would have been decreased by that same order of magnitude. Another funny story that proves Raleigh is well connected was a fight between two bars on Twitter that broke out trying to earn our patronage for a dinner on the town. If you're a business that isn't paying attention to Twitter are you losing the cost of a few beers or worse?

I'm sure there were more take aways I'll remember, but for now that's a good starting point. If you were at Future Web and had other big take aways, post them in comments.

PS. I got to meet a bunch of great local XML/XQuery folks at the XQuery meet-up I organized. I look forward to collaborating with these folks locally in the future.

XML-In-Practice Day #1 Summary

I'm at IDEAlliance XML-In-Practice 2009 in DC this week talking about IBM WebSphere XML and learning about other XML products and technologies. There are four tracks -- Publishing and Media, Applications, Foundation and Interoperability AKA the technology track, Electronic Medical Records and President Obama's Economic Plan, and e-Government. Based on my totally unscientific head count, the attendance to each track is 50%, 25%, 12% and 13%.

I attended the following sessions today -

Keynote - XML Enabled Medical Records - Dr. Clement McDonald

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I learned a) how technology is used to create repositories of information within hospitals/caregivers b) how much workload these systems exchange in the form of HL7 messages c) how distributed systems share data within a localized region for decision making, consistency of care d) how Web 2.0 is helping replace very complicated forms based desktop apps that are trusted currently e) how Dr's are happy to have a wealth of electronic information to help, but see putting new data into the system as something they cannot afford to do given already limited time with patient (call for smarter devices/speech to text) f) how different data is across the various medical interactions all the way from very structured to very narrative. The best two parts of the talk was the 0.5 seconds he showed an XML document which stressed the business aspect of this is key - the technology just has to exist behind the scenes to make it possible and seeing a Dr. throw stuffed pings to the audience (joke on how LOINC standards sounds like OINK).

Overview of President Obama's Electronic Medical Records Plan and Health Information Technology Architecture - John Quinn

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I a) learned how much money is set aside to rewards providers that move to standardized medical health records and what timelines exist to get these rewards b) learned how these timelines are aggressive based on time to implementation of typical systems c) learned how the rewards are based upon a certified system which is challenging to guarantee for valuable use. I really took away a deeper appreciation for not only the complexity inside of a single hospital, but also how challenging a national mandate will be (especially to individual physicians).

XSLT Stylesheets from Version 1.0 to 2.0 - Priscilla Walmsley

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I didn't take alot of notes in this session as I'm rather knowledgeable about this topic. However, I'd say it was a great presentation given the example (before and after) based approach.

Customer Use Case: How IBM Simplifies Complex Content Developing and Publishing Across the Enterprise. - Daniel Dionne

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Great presentation that didn't go into just what DITA for content development/publishing is, but showed the entire lifecycle and processes needed to make a wide adoption work. Went into some rather impressive use cases of the technology, along with challenges, within the IBM company.

Technical Overview of Relax-NG - Bob Ducharme

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Can't say I was a huge supporter of this talk, but that is likely due to the fact that I'm a data-oriented XML guy and I'm working on standards, customer situations that are very dependent on XML Schema. Bob discussed areas where Relax-NG was better than XML schema for mostly document oriented scenarios. I would have liked to see more mention of XML Schema 1.1 and how that changed the story. I did get some good value out of understanding why some document-centric customers are still using DTD's.

HL7's use of XML - Paul Knapp

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Learned how HL7 V3 XML isn't really yet used in US e-healthcare apps (every hospital is exchanging internal messages in HL7 V2). Abroad, new projects that are less than three years old are very likely to be HL7 V3. We should be seeing more of this in the states with new projects, especially as we start to consider the need to share information outside of a single hospital, etc. Paul did mention binary XML and how that would help many of the HL7 V3 current issues.

MarkLogic Beer and Demo Jam

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I did a 4 minute demo along with nine others during the reception. You get 5 minutes to do a demo with no preparation and the best demos win free stuff. I demoed the XML Feature Pack and the 40 samples we have along with the end to end blog checker sample written in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0. The samples I showed had a nice CSS and dashboard we've added since Beta 4 and that visual skinning over the XML technologies drew positive comments from the crowd. Didn't win anything in the end. Oh well.

After hours

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Finally, I was able to do dinner with about 15 folks who regularly attend these conferences. Some great conversation with people from all parts of the industry.

Quick summary of Summer XML Conference

I attended the Summer XML Conference in Raleigh on Monday and Tuesday. I presented on what is new in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 and how similar technologies are being used in Java based middleware.

I was a little worried, given the crowd, about how well the "what's new" presentation would go as a) I'm knowledgeable with the new standards, but don't use the standards in very large programs every day (some of the crowd were deeply knowledged XSLT 1.0 users) and b) it was the first time I've given the presentation. I did get two points of good feedback from the attendees, so I guess it better than I had hoped. I'm going to look to post the slides as they were information packed and other conference attendees said they would be useful for other members of their companies.

I, along with two of my team members, attended sessions on XSLT patterns, XML Schema 1.1, Schematron, HTML 5, XForms, SVG/Canvas, Testing XML Documents, and many presentations related to XML based document publishing for books and electronic help. The conference seemed to be 1/3 focused on XML technologies, 1/2 on document publishing with the rest being focused on data/application programming. Hopefully my talk on how these technologies are being used in middleware helps the group keep focus on XML scenarios outside of the document publishing space.

On the document publishing front, I learned even more than I ever imagined about what our documentation teams deal with on a daily basis. I also got great insight to the challenges of companies or parts of companies that deal entirely in products centered about content management and document re-use.

Summary: Great conference. Thanks to Kay and all the other conference presenters and attendees.

Customer feedback in Barcelona

Last week, the 2008 European WebSphere Technical Conference and the 2008 European Transaction & Messaging Conference were held in Barcelona.

From 2008-November-Barcelona

Yes, there are worse things than spending a week in Barcelona. I've never been there before, and I definitely needed at least another week to see everything I wanted to see.

From 2008-November-Barcelona

I was there to run our Customer Feedback Program, which is a new track that debuted last spring at Impact 2008. The idea is that at most IBM conferences, the attendees naturally spend most of the week listening to IBMers speak. Where are we headed? What's new in the products? What's our newest three letter acronym? We wanted to turn this around and have sessions where the customers do the talking and the IBMers do the listening.

From 2008-November-Barcelona

These are small roundtable sessions with a couple of IBMers (usually a technical architect, designer, and/or product manager) and around four customers. After the sessions, we consistently hear from customers that they are the most valuable sessions of the week from their perspective, and the IBMers always walk away with great feedback about our products.

From 2008-November-Barcelona

We're trying to make these customer feedbacks sessions a staple for all of our conferences - so the next time you attend a conference (like Impact 2009 at the Venetion in Las Vegas) look for the feedback sessions. It's time well spent.

And if you ever get an opportunity to go to Barcelona, take it!

But watch out for the pigeons...

From 2008-November-Barcelona