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Just made a major breakthrough in enabling editing of XML via the JavaEOXMLSupport framework. Turns out I was outsmarting myself again – trying to do too much work, instead of just letting go and letting WebObjects do what it does best. Once I did that, it was a 5 line addition of code (after skipping comments) to enable this. I’ll need to do some more testing, but it’s looking good. When it’s actually working, I’ll publish the changes to the SourceForge site.

Once I’m comfortable with the editing (and of course creating) of records, I’ll work on the JavaXStreamDBAdaptor to enable it to store the changes. (adding support for EOF saveChanges() will do – just remember to NOT DO TOO MUCH )

UPDATE:YES! It’s working perfectly! I just modified the xmldbTester.woa application to have a component that provides a form to edit a subset of the LOM (title, description, location, keywords, format). Works great! Sweet. Next up, I’ll package the new version of JavaEOXMLSupport.framework as version 0.2 and publish it to the Sourceforge website. Then, I’ll get to work on JavaXStreamDBAdaptor to enable saving the record there.

The coolest part of the whole editing form component is that it doesn’t even know it’s a front end for editing XML! It just knows that it’s getting/setting stuff at a keyValuePath. I bind the value of a text input component to “lom.general.title.string.content” and it Just Works. Behind the scenes, it’s modifying the DOM representing the XML document, and providing the naiive editing component with what appears to be regular plain old EOs.

I’m playing around with the CSS for this weblog, trying to make it a little easier to read, and less retina-wretching. I’ve taken design cues from HappyCog and others, but will be tweaking/changing at will for a while…

Haven’t implemented the new design site-wide yet (writeback pages still use the old icky design), but I like it better than the old one, so I’ll probably make the full switch.

I also dumped the sidebar. It was just a lot of superfluous info crap that wasn’t needed. I moved the meat of the sidebar into separate pages, accessible by the nav links at the top of each page. Search is available in the top banner on all pages as well.

If you notice your browser barfing badly on the new design, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do…

Saw a link to E4X yesterday, but nobody seemed to know what E4X really was, only that they had a very PR-ish PR.

Sean Corfield, over at An Architect’s View, has provided some more info. Basically E4X provides a more complete DOM, with methods to read, create, and query an XML document (including an XQuery implementation).

Also, it appears that E4X has grown from BEA’s scripting extensions, so it’s not a brand new thing – that’s good, in that it’s been in the wild for a while, rather than being restricted to the lab.

Bookmarking this, in case it comes in handy for the Pachyderm flash templates…

Just came across this link from a quasi-spam mailing by a java magazine. The article they sent was fluff, but gave a brief overview of SAML. This sounds like it might be useful for APOLLO, so I’m bookmarking it here.

It sounds like a way of dealing with federated identity, and the concepts of “user types” or “roles” – things that are becoming more important in APOLLO as it gets fleshed out.

Holy crap. I was just looking for something completely unrelated to this, but a random neuron got fired, and led me to this page, featuring 8 of Cory Doctorow’s books in iPod Notes format.

That’s too freaking cool! I’ve downloaded them, and will start reading through them (starting with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) during the daily commute…

UPDATE: Well, ok… that’s kinda interesting. After the iPod loaded all 500-odd pages of Notes for the books I downloaded to it, I’m really seeing the limitations of the iPod for this kind of thing. I’ll have to go in an rename some of the books so I can read the titles in the menu. And, after scrolling through the first 5 pages of Down and Out, I finally got the the end of the quotes, FAQ, and Creative Commons license… Doh. Might have to add a “Start the book already” link on page 1 of each book. Also, looks like there’s no way to bookmark where you are… Or, to quickly get back to the menu without going back through all of the pages you’ve read. oy.

So, the news of the new 4G iPods has been leaked rather publicly via MSNBC/Newsweek. Ars Technica is saying it’s a huge improvement (they’ve updated their article on AT – the first release of it was so full of incorrect information I was very surprised to see it on Ars!)

My reaction to the new scroll wheel is something like “uh, I prefer the separate buttons, thank you very much.” The combined scroll-wheel-button thingy was created for the iPod Mini, which doesn’t have the real estate available for dedicated buttons. Makes sense there, not so much on the Full iPod.

The new menu structure looks cool (a bit more streamlined), and some of the other features (slow down/speed up tracks without distortion, multiple on-the-go playlists) could be useful. Here’s hoping that it’s just a firmware update away from my 3G iPod…

But, 60GB on the high end. Holy crap. That’s three times the size of the drive in mine. Combine that with slightly better batter life, and a thinner design…

Following a post by Scott Leslie mentioning the release of Sakai 1.0 rc1, I figured I’d take a swing at installing it on our shiny new XServe.

Installation was a piece of cake (just be sure to set all of the environment variables, and download/configure the ~/build.properties file so it can find all dependencies for downloading). Once the source was downloaded, it really only took a minute to compile and deploy the application (although I spent much MUCH longer than that twiddling around with configuring the build).

Anyway, it built and deployed just fine on MacOSX Server 10.3.4. I fired up Tomcat, and pointed my browser to the embedded version of Sakai and got an exciting empty template page. Doh.

Now, to try to find some documentation on wtf Sakai “does”, and what needs to be configured to make it do that…

Actually, it finally arrived on Monday, after slightly over 4 months on the waiting list. After it was taken out of the box and plugged in, it took maybe 5 minutes to fully configure the machine. Now, we just have to copy some APOLLO apps and resources on it, and it’s good to go!

This beauty sports dual 2GHz G5 processors, and a moderate-sized 80GB drive – we’ll tie it into our XRAID as soon as the card arrives, so it will have something silly like 3.5TB of storage space. It’s a little RAM starved at the moment, coming with the stock 512MB – that won’t do for long…

I was a little stumped as to how I would configure the server. Previously, I’d had to connect a monitor and do the config locally, logged into the machine “in person”. I actually had to search the docs, and it mentioned Server Assistant. Sure, I’ve used it locally before (you know, standing in front of the server, with a monitor plugged in and all), but I was completely surprised by the remote config function (which I had previously never noticed) – I launched it on my Tibook (on the other side of the building from the new XServe), and it scanned the LAN looking for servers that needed configuring. I selected the shiny new XServe, provided the serial number, and was done the whole process in under 5 minutes, with a fully configured, fully functional, secure application server.

Just found a link to Using XPath in Flash MX 2004. Might come in handy, so I’m saving it here…

Mike and I were discussing the XML stuff we’ve been doing the other day, and I suggested we should post the JavaEOXMLSupport framework and JavaXStreamDBAdaptor as open source, to test the waters. He agreed, and so I’ve created a project on SourceForge to host it.

Currently, there are only 2 packages available, in raw source form (with little or no documentation – actually, there aren’t even READMEs in there yet!), but I’ll be updating the releases as we move along, and adding documentation and test apps when they’re ready.

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