It’s just data
Rogers Cadenhead: My weblog’s Atom 1.0 feed is now online. As an experiment, I’m routing all RSS requests to this feed. I’m curious about whether aggregators can handle that. The RSS 2.0 code’s still around so I can offer both, but I’d prefer to offer a feed in one format so I avoid the need to debug two.
I’m following Rogers' lead, and have done the same with my remaining feeds.
Antonio Cangiano: I am well aware that there are not many Ruby jobs out there at the moment, so I consider myself lucky as I work with Ruby and Ruby on Rails on a daily basis at IBM.
Donald Ferguson: Calvin “ Silent Cal” Coolidge was also from rural New England. A newspaper reporter was going to the White House for a state dinner. She bet her editor that she could get Silent Cal to say more than three words to her at dinner. At dinner, she charmingly told the situation to Silent Cal. His response. “You lose.” My hero.
I remember a meeting in Austin, TX a few years back in which there were perhaps 80 or so people in a long and narrow room. Don positioned his chair sideways on the narrow edge nearest the door. At one point, he had something to add. As he began to speak, he was quickly interrupted with a request: “Could you speak up?”. Don paused for a second. His then responded with a “no”, whereupon he proceeded from the point where he had left off.
The “less code” and “simpler” memes are advancing from below. And from above. From the inside. As well as from the outside.
danah boyd: I am in awe of what these students did. As a population, teens are silenced by society, ineligible to vote. And yet, they took to the streets to stand up for what they believe in. They used the digital public to rally each other, to spread information and encouragement even though most knew they faced disapproving schools. They stood in solidarity, speaking out for an oppressed population that resides in this country. How amazing is that?
45% of my subscribers are subscribed to my RSS 0.91 feed. This leads me to wonder how many aggregators actually support RSS 0.91 correctly, as that is the one feed format that is unambiguously <plaintext> from top to bottom.
Tim Bray: Red Herring: Statelessness · Statelessness isn’t an architectural fundamental, it’s a useful engineering technique for making distributed systems scaleable. Lots of Web-style applications keep all sorts of client state on the server and they work just fine. Those ones probably won’t scale up to serve all of humanity across the Internet, or even a hundred thousand busy online shoppers, but there are lots of useful apps that don’t need that kind of scale
It is worth looking at protocols that predated HTTP, like FTP. I agree that explicit sessions (via techniques like cookies or URI rewriting) are a part of the Internet as practiced today. However, it is worth pointing out that the trend is away from implicit state and multi-layered protocols.
I also find it facinating that people square off on REST vs Web Services, when SMTP and BitTorrent are the real winners.
Diane Duane: Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.
It turns out that the hardest part about porting Ruby DB2 from Unbuntu to Windows was getting a compilation environment set up. These instructions contained the key.
Mihai Parparita: While developing this sharing feature, it became clear that the ultimate origin of an item in a feed is very important (i.e. I may see it because I’m subscribed to your “web-dev” label, but really it’s from QuirksBlog). We joked about the need for a “Molecule” format that would specify the aggregation of multiple Atom feeds. We even began coding a (namespaced) origin element that would contain the title, id, homepage URL, etc. of the originating site for this item. Then, while re-reading RFC 4287 for another reason, we came across the source element in Atom, which does exactly what we had set out to (re)implement.
[Via Robert Sayre, who quite appropriately attributes this idea to long time Atom Contributor Bob Wyman].
John Cowan: We all (being reasonable persons and not fanatics) are trapped by Quine’s Paradox
Thanks Tim!
jonnay: All this jazz about HTTP error messages, methods beyond GET and POST, its all just good HTTP baby. It has very little to do with actual restfulness or not. All the HTTP conformance in the world wont mean a thing if your application stores client state on the server. You still won’t be RESTful.
In all, it looks like my optimism of nearly three and a half years ago was largely unwarranted.
Not everybody is in a position where they have ready access to a machine running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) with IE7 Beta 2 Preview loaded on it. So, to make life easier, I’ve converted Dave Johnson’s program to a web application, and I’m looking for volunteers to host it.
James Holderness: Twenty contestants! Thirty-one tests! Spanning three hundred years and fourteen time zones! ... Sorry, I got a little over excited there. These are the results of my RSS date tests.
Sobering.
Joe Gregorio: If you squint your eyes hard enough anything can be made to look like REST
Dave Johnson: That’s pretty weird alright, but they’re on the right track. They’re using Atom elements to model RSS.
It looks like Microsoft is actually deploying code which utilizes the Simple List Extensions namespace. Sort of.
It appears that the SLE spec was updated a week ago today.
Unfortunately, none of the elements or attribute inserted by
FeedsManager.Normalize() are actually defined by the
specification.
Requests:
<cf:sort element="description"/>
would mean in a context where the feed you get is not
necessarily the feed that was produced.For nearly three weeks now, the Feed Validator
has issued a
warning
when it encounters an item in an RSS 2.0 feed that does not contain
a guid. Despite this warning being
exposed to a large number of people during these weeks, today
it received its
first serious complaint.
Robert Sayre: The most rewarding thing I’ve done this year and last was getting involved in the Mozilla project. It can be slow, bureaucratic, and irritating, but good stuff gets done in the end
My experience with Mozilla was abysmal. Despite having a solid background in C/C++, and COM (albeit MS-COM), the existing class libraries were daunting and clearly had evolved over time; for example, there are a number of different String classes.
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah: To recap, the REST elevator pitch is
Michael Coté: The current enterprise software market fears rapid release cycles. Rightly so: it usually doesn’t work. Technologies like MySpace will erode that fear as new people enter and change the culture of the enterprise world. In addition to this cultural hurdle, the major technological hurdle is providing software as a hosted service, or even a net-desktop hybrid (think Windows and OS X update for everything), instead of millions of desktop installs.
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah: The thing however is that these details do matter and they are best dealt with up front. The aggregate waste of programmer effort in pursuit of minutiae might keep the profession in business but it surely isn’t sustainable.
Excellent post.
P.S. here is the link to my description of the xsd:boolean issue. In the first SOAPBuilders interoperability meeting, both the Microsoft and Apache implementations initially failed.
Dave Johnson: While we waited for Atom protocol to stabilize, things changed in the world of C# and Java feed APIs. Microsoft introduced the Windows RSS platform and a pre-release of the Windows Feeds API is available in the IE7 beta. And ROME has come along way too; now with Atom format 1.0 support and a growing list of extension modules. We decided that we just couldn’t publish a book on RSS and Atom without covering the Windows RSS platform and ROME in-depth.
Dave is already uncovering some “interesting” (read: difficult to explain) results with the Windows Feeds API. Dropping the email address of the person in favor of the name seems particularly troublesome.
I wonder if Dave plans to look at the Google Reader platform?
Jonno Downes: I was curious to see how IE handled all the different HTTP status codes, so I put together some ruby scripts to test them
I’ve tried this with Firefox.
Tony Baer: You had, in effect, a barrier between the circulatory and nervous systems where interaction, and responsibility for it, was carefully proscribed.
Except for the proscribed/ prescribed gaffe, I like the analogy.
Richard MacManus: Niall Kennedy is on a roll, having this week published an informative series of posts on the RSS platform and the ‘state of the aggregator’
Joe Gregorio: The Atom Publishing Protocol Test Suite has been added to the subversion repository of the Feed Validator
Discussion should take place on the
atom-protocol
mailing list
An analysis of a week’s work of click-throughs on Feed Validator [help] links
Ryan Tomayko: I believe that a majority of people in IT now consider dynamic languages like Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP to be very much capable of sitting at the table with Java and .NET for a wide range of common technical problems. Similarly, straight-forward systems like REST, Microformats, and Atom are generally considered legitimate alternatives to the vendor/analyst/press peddled technologies like WS-* for a wide range of integration issues
David Heinemeier Hansson: A huge thanks to the team behind the Atompub specification. This document has been a massive eye opener to best practice use of HTTP in a RESTful fashion. I encourage everyone with an interest in web services to read it. It started an avalanche of ideas in my mind. This respond_to implementation is just one offspring of those ideas.
Nice to hear, but I’d like to point out a cautionary note about that one particular feature.
Don’t get me wrong, HTTP and REST are great stuff. But just like everything else, there are a few pitfalls to watch out for.
My advice: some of these features can wait for Rails 1.2.
Meanwhile, it looks like DabbleDB has added the Atom API to its plans.
David Heinemeier Hansson: The greater the versatility, the higher the abstraction, the less useful for the specifics.
I’m old enough to remember when relational databases were controversial. Some of the arguments brought forward at those times are very reminiscent of the ones being made today. Meanwhile David’s The sprint of ideas before release are making me drool, particularly as I had an opportunity to discuss a few of them with David at ETech last week.
For recreation, some people like to do NY Times crosswords puzzles in ink. Me, I like tackling small, incremental, computer programming tasks. A few years ago, that was Gump, these days it is the Feed Validator. And until I wrote that sentence, it hadn’t occurred to me how similar those two tasks are: the immediate goal of each is to get consumers and producers talking about interfaces, with the ultimate goal of improving plug and play.
Diego Doval: The whole content store is now AtomAPI-accessible. Cool eh?
Bing! Errr, um, ... Ning!
Yes, it is cool. Way cool. Welcome aboard.
Susan A. Kitchens: It’s crafty. Subtle. With a silent “b,” and is way beyond me. B that stands for Busy. Right here in River City.
It really bothers me when the Feed Validator can’t provide helpful advice.
Sometime, about two weeks ago, I started having problems with applications which involve VPNing into work, specifically with Sametime. By issuing the following command, these problems seem to have gone away:
sudo ifconfig ath0 mtu 1415
I hate it when that happens.
We now have a Dish Player 942 and a PocketDish AV700E. We had a bit of trouble getting it (and some more with installation, but that’s another story), but now everything is in place and we are pleased.
My daughter was given the following puzzle as extra credit
SourceForge: The SourceForge.net Service Operations Group has completed the implementation of the Subversion service offering on SourceForge.net
Thanks go out to Joe Gregorio for spotting this and doing the heavy lifting (a few button presses, apparently) to migrate the FeedValidator from CVS to Subversion.
Note: I would point to Joe’s post on the feedvalidator-users mailing list, but due to a ML services issue, the web archives aren’t being updated at the moment.