Category: XML

The lingua franca of the Internet.

Amazon publishes RSS feeds.

From Amazon’s Web Services Newsletter #3…

Amazon now provides RSS feeds for many browse nodes. These feeds were
built using AWS and XSLT. You can find convenient “builders” for the
feed URLs at several locations including
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/AmazonRSS.asp and
http://www.neopoleon.com/blog/chooseFeedGroup.aspx .

For more information about Amazon’s feeds visit
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html . For more
information about RSS, visit
http://www.code101.com/Code101/DisplayArticle.aspx?cid=41 .

From the Amazon Web Services newsletter #2…

Jeff Barr recently spoke at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and
the Applied XML Conference. If you were unable to attend, you can find
some great online summaries here:

    http://www.camworld.com/archives/001226.html
    http://www.sellsbrothers.com/spout/#The_Killer_App_for_Web_Services
   
http://www.neopoleon.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx/40c488e8-c87a-4faa-9ecd-53046e9f74f5
   
http://www.neopoleon.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx/0de9bf3e-837a-4f5a-bd2b-b3dce222d646

SVG links and resources

Data-Driven SVG Apps: A Rapid Development Approach
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/02/13/svg.html?page=1
 
Consider the business example of a building floor plan. The user wants to be able to pull up a digital image (GIF or JPEG file) of the floor plan; review and annotate the drawing to note locations of electrical outlets, phone jacks, and ethernet jacks; and save the changes into a database. Annotations are done by creating red rectangles for electrical outlets, blue rectangles for phone jacks, and green rectangles for Ethernet jacks. In addition to the graphics, the user can specify properties like the number of electrical outlets at the location, the number of phone jacks and the telephone numbers at each location; and the number of Ethernet jacks and the IP addresses at the location. For the above example, the appeal of SVG is that an XML document can be created dynamically on the server while pulling content (graphical and business) from a database, while changes made by the user can be updated in the database. This role is traditionally performed by the middle tier. The middle tier, in this case, will create the SVG file by extracting data from database, and parse the SVG file and update the database. [Full Article]
Demo that shows dragging houses onto a satellite map and then entering data.
 
Includes detailed explanation of how-to. Data is stored in an Oracle
Example of a database-driven map using PostgreSQL and the PostGIS plug-in
http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/foerster_winter__atlas_of_tyrol/
 
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL database, follows the “Simple Features Specification for SQL” defined by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) and allows to store, index and query geometric features like point, line, polygon, multipoint, multiline, multipolygon
and geometry collections in 2d as well as 3d coordinate space. [Full Article]

Cross-platform, cross-browser XML apps.

Firebird Mac running an XSLT app

Let’s review what’s happening in this screen shot. I’m running Mozilla Firebird on my Mac. The application is a structured search of my OSCOM slides. There’s no search engine beyond the browser itself, which provides the JavaScript UI, the XPath-based search, and the XSLT-driven results display. … [Jon’s Radio]

Assembling Web services “Companies that have an enormous amount of data and disparate computing systems will find that they are a natural fit for web services.”…Companies are beginning to understand the real benefits of web services and are now mandating all new applications introduced into their IT environment to be web services-ready, rather than just web-ready…Beyond the enterprise, adoption is the most aggressive in industries where change is a constant. IT plays a key role in product and service innovation and competitive industries. Some of the industries include logistics, transportation, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services, said Lim…Most companies who sincerely wanted to undertake a web services project today would find suitable skills in consultants but they will probably not find many experienced skills within their own IT shops.”
[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News]