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whois aoltimewarneryahoo.com

Here.

I haven't had a lot of time to study the UDDI spec, but I have been pondering the topic of Open Services for quite some time and my feeling is they will. I like the term Open Services, as Tim O'Reilly calls them, over Web services because this concept is applicable beyond HTML and just the Web.

I think the biggest hurdle at the moment for this concept, is the perception that Microsoft invented this concept (therefore there must be something sinister and evil behind it!) and its tied to just their technology which is just plain off.

The idea of open services where around before SOAP. I haven't done an in-depth genealogy of the concept, but I can tell you Dave Winer at Userland has been evangelizing it for a couple of year now. There is also Allaire's WDDX and in a looser sense RSS and ICE.

Microsoft did initiate the SOAP spec, but have put they have opened it up and submitted to the W3C. They incorporated IBM's feedback which garnered IBM whole-hearted support. IBM released their Java implementation on AlphaWorks and then donated the code to Apache. Even Sun conceded it was a good idea and gave as much of an endorsement as they could stomach for something Microsoft had initiated.

I would even argue that IBM is excelling beyond Microsoft. Well... at least in the developer community. They've yet to release anything commercially or articulated a product strategy that utilizes it. (Typical them.) Microsoft does seem to be betting quite a bit on SOAP/Open Services and going from there.

What I love about this concept (and why I think it will succeed) is that its fairly easy and straight forward to work with. It also is a more concrete way to get all of these different platforms that are deployed to talk to each other. It will just makes developing easier, better and smarter.

The way I read it, UDDI is just a progression in making solutions built on this concept more robust.

For all of those interested in this topic, here are some good background links on the topic that aren't so Microsoft-rah-rah.

• The Network Really Is The Computer
• XML: A Disruptive Technology
• AGENCY.CO M's Flexitecture Methodology
• Meerkat: An Open Wire Service
• XMethods: Web Service Listing
• SOAP::Lite (A lightweight SOAP server written in Perl)
• xml-rpc.com
• soap.weblogs.com
• Apache SOAP

If you ask Jon Udell, the web services are already here. The latest buzzword advances with XML, SOAP, XML-RPC, and friends are all just further refinement and evolution of the interface. Also, Udell's book, Practical Internet Groupware, talks extensively about adapting existing sites into web services. For example, a site like MetaCrawler demonstrates this in how it uses search engines' HTML "interface" to scoop up search results. Or, take the scripts that query news sites without the benefit of RDF or RSS, parsing HTML to scoop up and aggregate news headlines. These are all primitive web services.

And this is not to mention app servers such as Zope and Frontier, which are already built to offer web services natively. It just seems irresistable to use all of these simple building blocks to create neato keen distributed systems...

It could have been in the attached MS Word .DOC file as well. And anyone who goes to ther MSDN site for various tech info, having to use IE with full ActiveX enabled to make the sites work right, is potentially infected. Or anyone using the MSDN Libraries, including MSVC Help, of recent couple years (which also don't work well without internet connection enabled).

Their whole "vision thing" of hypertext documents which seamlessly integrate your computer (via the MSDN Libraries, including compiler help files) into the Microsoft servers, reporting (if they wish so) anything you look up, any articles you read and for how long, anything you search for, which code samples you extract, ... even without coupling with ActiveX, is a virus/trojan handcrafted for industrial espionage, all by itself.

I wish only Bill Gates' machines and those of the other brains behind the Microsoft all-is-one (or is it one-is-all) "vision" got some of their own medicine.

BTW, I just typed in my first message in here, and this luxuriously spacious /. edit box with its eye pleasing courier font makes Microsoft Notepad seem like an ultra-ergonomic editor from the future. (The only cure for this is to make the web designer here use this exact edit box for three days for all of her editing work; by the second day the edit box would be twice as wide and three times as tall and user could set their own non-fixed pitch fonts. By the third day she would suggest dumping it altogether and using something like Userland's Manila editor .)

I'm surprised /. hasn't picked this up yet:

adobe.com whois lookup

Adobe.com was hijacked by somebody in China today! ftp.adobe.com doesn't work, etc.

hmm. i kinda wonder do they get to keep their domain for free. mostly, i think, this is called cheating. so i think nsi will claim " we just forgot fix a bug in some old update script " or something like that

so the network solutions whois claims that it expired 21.oct.1996 but last update was 10.nov.1999!
whois query provided by whois.userland.com

It may require more work, but two modes (i.e., flash/non-flash, text-only/graphical) may just be the easiest way to go -- so long as the content is identical in both modes. I imagine a site with fewer toys is easier to make accessible.

A nice way to manage multiple versions of the same site is to use server-side tools such as UserLand Frontier (which I used to use to manage my static site), PHP, Zope, or any of the many others out there -- these three are the ones I've tried. With a bit of scripting, you can get a good idea of what tricks you can use with a particular client, and tailor the page you serve to that client.

Building static sites with the same capabilities is harder -- as far as I can tell, there are very few tools for building nice sites offline and then uploading them to a remote server. (As I said, I used to use Frontier (which is (1) expensive, and (2) Mac/Windows only), and am currently frustrating myself by trying to bend Zope to my will (made hard by the lack of basic documentation) -- suggestions for alternatives are very welcome!)

Here's a very relevant article criticizing most accounts of computer history. This fellow basically says that most people just tell stories with classic heroes like RMS. I think a computer historian would be a great profession, since its very badly needed.

Most notably, the developers did a lot of work on the SOAP specs. See Frontier and SOAP or the search results page.

There are also lots of links to Perl, Python or what have you implementations of SOAP. I think some of those folks would count as being in the Linux world.

Most notably, the developers did a lot of work on the SOAP specs. See Frontier and SOAP or the search results page.

There are also lots of links to Perl, Python or what have you implementations of SOAP. I think some of those folks would count as being in the Linux world.

Most notably, the developers did a lot of work on the SOAP specs. See Frontier and SOAP or the search results page.

There are also lots of links to Perl, Python or what have you implementations of SOAP. I think some of those folks would count as being in the Linux world.

Sound familiar? It sure does to Apple. It's a little something Microsoft likes to call Embrace & Extend.

Three options I can think of are

1. Digital Creations' Zope
2. UserLand's Frontier.
3. Apple's WebObjects

Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable easy-to-use frontends.

Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community, and is a co-author of SOAP). Manila gives you Web-based editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for some examples of what people are doing with Manila.

There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that may not be an issue for your company:

1. It's expensive. US$899 per copy (basically per machine), with volume discounts for five or more licenses.
2. At the moment, it only runs on Windows (2000 and NT, of course, but also 95 and 98) and Macintosh. There is supposed to be a port to Linux underway, but the last time I heard anything, that port was going to be using WINE, and so would be x86-only.
3. It's proprietary. As a commercial product, the source is closed. It has a powerful scripting language called UserTalk that can allow you to do amazing things, but I don't know how easy it would be to write extensions.

Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac, for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people started.

WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11. (The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and 2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript. WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run their own sites within its aegis.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

Three options I can think of are

1. Digital Creations' Zope
2. UserLand's Frontier.
3. Apple's WebObjects

Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable easy-to-use frontends.

Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community, and is a co-author of SOAP). Manila gives you Web-based editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for some examples of what people are doing with Manila.

There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that may not be an issue for your company:

1. It's expensive. US$899 per copy (basically per machine), with volume discounts for five or more licenses.
2. At the moment, it only runs on Windows (2000 and NT, of course, but also 95 and 98) and Macintosh. There is supposed to be a port to Linux underway, but the last time I heard anything, that port was going to be using WINE, and so would be x86-only.
3. It's proprietary. As a commercial product, the source is closed. It has a powerful scripting language called UserTalk that can allow you to do amazing things, but I don't know how easy it would be to write extensions.

Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac, for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people started.

WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11. (The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and 2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript. WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run their own sites within its aegis.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

Three options I can think of are

1. Digital Creations' Zope
2. UserLand's Frontier.
3. Apple's WebObjects

Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable easy-to-use frontends.

Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community, and is a co-author of SOAP). Manila gives you Web-based editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for some examples of what people are doing with Manila.

There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that may not be an issue for your company:

1. It's expensive. US$899 per copy (basically per machine), with volume discounts for five or more licenses.
2. At the moment, it only runs on Windows (2000 and NT, of course, but also 95 and 98) and Macintosh. There is supposed to be a port to Linux underway, but the last time I heard anything, that port was going to be using WINE, and so would be x86-only.
3. It's proprietary. As a commercial product, the source is closed. It has a powerful scripting language called UserTalk that can allow you to do amazing things, but I don't know how easy it would be to write extensions.

Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac, for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people started.

WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11. (The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and 2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript. WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run their own sites within its aegis.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

Three options I can think of are

1. Digital Creations' Zope
2. UserLand's Frontier.
3. Apple's WebObjects

Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable easy-to-use frontends.

Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community, and is a co-author of SOAP). Manila gives you Web-based editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for some examples of what people are doing with Manila.

There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that may not be an issue for your company:

1. It's expensive. US$899 per copy (basically per machine), with volume discounts for five or more licenses.
2. At the moment, it only runs on Windows (2000 and NT, of course, but also 95 and 98) and Macintosh. There is supposed to be a port to Linux underway, but the last time I heard anything, that port was going to be using WINE, and so would be x86-only.
3. It's proprietary. As a commercial product, the source is closed. It has a powerful scripting language called UserTalk that can allow you to do amazing things, but I don't know how easy it would be to write extensions.

Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac, for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people started.

WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11. (The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and 2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript. WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run their own sites within its aegis.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

Sort of a related opinion piece by Dave Winer...

Software and the First Amendment

"There is no difference between code and writing. I think I can prove it. Manila, the content management system that I use, supports macros. When you put text in curly braces, as the page is rendered, the macro is evaluated. Such macros can be embedded in protected speech, ie prose. What goes inside the curly braces is program logic. So if I want First Amendment protection for my code all I have to do is embed it in a Web page."

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com -- Usability Vortal and News Hub

no-dioxine Chicken Frier

Here is one mirror already: http://static.userland.com/misc/elian/

After having slaved away for several weeks building an per/xml based content engine (Kumera), I started having a look around to see what else was out there, and got suddenly depressed.

The only saving grace was that is Australia, the cost of running a dedicated server is way too high, and so there is still space for a cgi-bin perl based system.

Although you may not be interested in all of this, I'm doing it for my own sanity and clarity ...

In my wandering I have found ...

http://slashcode.com/ - the content engine that slashdot is based on. Runs in mod_perl (or cgi-bin I guess), very sofisticated. Has daemons that run to collect content for the slashboxes and everything else we know and love about slashdot.

http://www.zope.org/ - not sure, I think it's a python based application server that has some content systems built around them, including (just to confuse you) http://squishdot.org/ which is the slashdot code ported to zope (I think)

http://frontier.userland.com/ - is a news system/engine that has a thing called manilla, http://manila.userland.com/ which is a front end to editing and so on. Frontier isn't free or open source, but very popular.

http://java.apache.org/jetspeed which is a portal based engine built on top of turbine which is an applicate framework for building applications. There is a content engine and discussion group system that are developed by someone else, who are expecting to open source the discussion groups, and provide source and binarys for a low cost of the content engine.

And there are a few more application systems, which are not exactly content management systems as such, but could be used to build some ... like cold fusion, active server pages, java server pages, php3, and the list goes on and on and on ...

The more I look there more there is ...

Dave Winer over at Userland has an interesting take on Bezos' comparison of A* to N* (among other things). There's a bit of cant about Amazon's "converstaion" with the Web community, a phrase that's getting beat into the ground with the success of The Cluetrain Manifesto etc., but on the whole it's a good rebuttal. (And he's right that Amazon's customer-service form letters truly suck.)

Follow this link for a discussion he's having with Dave Winer on this very subject.

Weblogs force the reader's attention on only one or a few sources, rather than the tens of thousands of available sources. Dave Winer (of davenet, the weblog of all weblogs) suggests that weblog owners regularly profile other weblogs, however I do not believe that gets at the really interesting content that I'm sure is out there. I have "mindshare" for about five daily sources of information. I definitely do not want to spend my day searching and browsing the web, but I do want to see the best ideas out there. Any ideas for an interface that would deepen the weblog experience to form richer communities?

The Bugroff license is very similar to Dave Winer's license for MacBird. Only Winer phrased his in legalese...

Jack

It doesn't have the scalability being boasted about, but it isn't meant to, either.

Gee you must have read today's DaveNet.

Here's what Dave Winer had to say about it this morning:

from http://davenet.userland.com/19 99/10/19/youGottaBelieve

Click click.. Earth to SlashDot

I almost broke my work flow as the SlashDot folks discovered SOAP over the weekend. I thought it might be worth a comment because they played the usual tune, more fear of Microsoft. I just want to shake the Linux community until they hear me. You don't lead a revolution with fear. It's OK to be scared, but if you want to win you have to go thru it.

They may be the last group to figure out that the world no longer revolves around Microsoft. Microsoft gets it. That's why they did SOAP. But Microsoft losing dominance doesn't mean that Linux rules the world. The vast majority of people don't use Linux. As one of several non-dominant OSes, it's in Linux's favor if other OSes are open to it. That's what SOAP is about. It's an invitation, an open door, but the Linux voices only see a threat.

An old friend of mine said "Too bad, so sad." That's what I would have said, but it's so well-rehearsed, instead I stayed with my own revolution, and didn't break out and write a separate piece about it.

This is the way to go. It is an open, simple, cross platform, language independant web-based protocol.

MS is basing its new SOAP "standard" for distributed objects around it, too - but don't let that put you off.

The good thing about a standard like this is that it is SO simple that you can write your own server, so you really understand how it is working, if you want.

It is highly scalable, too - all the solutions that have been developed for serving big web sites are immediatly useful, now.

See Userland for more info.

The feature list is impressive: supports WebDAV, interprocess communication with XML-RPC, support TCP/IP access for distributed computing as well as TCP/IP server and client capability, can serve http content from the object DB (static or dynamic) or the local filesystem, handles XML better than Java does, and has a great deal of groupware functionality plugged in. It even plays nice with Dreamweaver, and it runs under Linux with WINE.

The kernel of Frontier isn't open source, which is a pity. Most of the functionality, however, is available and fixes and improvements are available.

Frontier has a very powerful and clean language called Usertalk. Meatt Neuburg ons wrote an excellent book available from O'Rielly.

It's cool, check it out

I'm surprised that nobody here has mentioned frontier. Or at least a quick skimming and a search on frontier turned up nothing. Anyways, its not wysiwyg, but its extremely powerful. It allows for awesome templating capabilities so you can have monkeys populate large sites with little or no knowledge of HTML. Most monkeys know a little HTML, right? It has its own database, runs on both windows and macintosh and soon linux as well via wine, its pretty close to working now.

It has an intergrated database that isnt very hard to learn how to use. On the macintosh, where it was born, you can edit files directly out of its database in things like Dreamweaver or BBedit. This feature is coming to windows. You can also set it up as a server and have people submit content via file sharing, email, or ftp. There is even an extension someone has written that lets you edit files in the database from a web browser.

The closest thing to this type of environment that i've seen running on linux is Zope, but Frontier is, in my opinion, easier to learn and use. Also it doesnt rely on a web interface, which can be slow at times.

Anyways you can still download a free version of 5.0.1 from their site at www.userland.com. I'm not sure of the exact URL for the free download, but you can email me and I'll find it if you cant.

They are at version 6.0 right now, and the newer versions are no longer free. But 5.0.1 is still very powerfull, and FREE. I like free, so much i bought a licensed copy. Wait, that doesnt make sense. Anyways, Frontier rocks, Frontier is the best, all bow down to the power of Frontier!