Author: Jeff Potts

Open source and visible source.

Zope Corp.’s layered strategy of engagement with open source and visible-source communities is a compelling blend of the strengths of free and commercial software development. In two previous columns, Open source citizenship and Giving back to open source, I explored the tendency of enterprises to fork open source projects rather than join them. Pedhazur suggests that a commercial entity supporting both an open source base and a visible-source layered product can reduce the need to fork. By outsourcing code enhancements, the argument goes, an enterprise can enjoy single-throat-to-choke control without seceding from a project’s community. It remains to be seen how broadly this model can apply, but in cases where it does, what’s not to like? [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

In this two-minute clip, Zope Corp.’s Chairman Hadar Pedhazur describes the visible source model as a middle-ground option between the few large open source projects, whose direction an enterprise cannot easily influence, and the many smaller ones that enterprises can influence, but typically fork in order to do so. … [Jon’s Radio]

Documentum Puts Foot in BPM Market. Further challenging the borders of Enterprise Content Management companies and definitions, Documentum today announced the immediate availability of its Documentum Business Process Management (BPM) solution. The Documentum BPM solution consists of several new products, including Documentum Business Process Manager, Documentum Business Process Services, Documentum Forms Builder, and the latest version of Documentum’s enterprise collaboration solution, Documentum eRoom. Unique to this… [cmswire]

Ektron joins the forms-as-content race. It was perhaps inevitable that e-forms and content management would begin to converge at some level. For the past couple of years, various CMS vendors — especially the hosted sol… [CMSWatch Trends and Features]

I’m floored that the ECM vendors haven’t filled this gaping hole already. Customers spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on an ECM footprint. Then, when they get it up-and-running, they ask the simple yet inevitable quesiton–How do I put some forms in my portal that can pump the data right into my ECM platform’s workflow and repository? The answer has been, “Just whip up a webapp. Here’s the API reference.” It’s a huge step backward. Not to be Old Lotus Notes Guy here, but hello? It should be nearly code-free at this point, particularly as standards like XForms gain momentum.

Netflix and Cocoon steal time from blog

Two things are stealing time away from the time budget previously allocated to blogging:

1. Netflix. Having a constant supply of movies on-hand that have been on my to-be-watched list for some time is awesome, and I love that I’m getting caught up. But, the blog has suffered.

2. Integrating Documentum with Cocoon. I got my DQL Transformer working some time ago but I ran into a problem transforming the DQL query result with my stylesheet. What sucks is that I had to upgrade my DFC and all of my WDK apps because of my current project, and after that, I discovered the problem. So now I’ve got to figure out if it was the upgrade or something else.

Until now I hadn’t been able to get logging to work from my custom transformer but this problem forced me to work through that. It turned out to be a simple thing that just wasn’t documented clearly. The solution was to use the logger attribute on my transformer declaration in sitemap.xmap like this:

<map:transformer name=”dqlquery” src=”com.navigatorsystems.cocoon.dctm.transformation.XdqlTransformer” logger=”sitemap.transformer.dqlquery”>

The category declaration in logkit.xconf matches up with that like this:

<category log-level=”DEBUG” name=”sitemap.transformer.dqlquery”>
  <log-target id-ref=”dqlquery”/>
  <log-target id-ref=”error”/>
</category>

The DQL Transformer works like the SQL Transformer. It receives SAX events looking for a query element. When it finds it, it executes the query against Documentum as an XDQL query (ie, the DQL query results get returned as a well-formed XML document). The XML that gets returned gets sent to the next component in the pipeline (like another transformer or a serializer).

I am now back to running on Cocoon 2.1 instead of the version that came with the Cocoon book. And I’m running it on Tomcat 4.1.

XML databases move to the middle.

It’s true that you can use native XML databases to manage the growing number of business documents created by the new generation of XML-savvy end-user applications. It’s handy, for example, to search an insurance database for incident reports that match some structured pattern of in-line metadata. But hybrid SQL/XML databases can do that too, and they can also join the structured XML content with relational columns — a powerful combination. So XML databases are migrating into a niche that SQL/XML can’t and won’t occupy. They’re becoming the high-performance pumps that push XML traffic around on the emerging services web. [InfoWorld.com]

This short piece is a companion to Sean McCown’s excellent cover story which surveys the XML features of leading relational databases: Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase. … [Jon’s Radio]

Adobe Acquires Q-Link Technologies. Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that it has acquired Q-Link Technologies, Inc., a provider of business process management software. The acquisition provides Java-based workflow technology that will be integrated with the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform to help customers reduce document processing cycle times, eliminate bottlenecks and integrate business processes more easily and efficiently across the extended enterprise…[Gilbane Report News]