Slashdot Mirror

Spy der Mann writes "Remember the recent discussion on Binary XML? Well, there's news. The W3C just released the specs for XML-binary optimized packaging (XOP). In summary, they take binary data out of the XML, and put it in a separate section using MIME-Multipart. You can read the press release and the testimonials from MS, IBM and BEA."

Spy der Mann writes "Remember the recent discussion on Binary XML? Well, there's news. The W3C just released the specs for XML-binary optimized packaging (XOP). In summary, they take binary data out of the XML, and put it in a separate section using MIME-Multipart. You can read the press release and the testimonials from MS, IBM and BEA."

An anonymous contributor writes "XML.com just published an article titled Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL written by Michael Day and Håkon Wium Lie. The article was written in response to Norm Walsh's claim that CSS will never fix [printing]. Did you hear me? CSS will never fix it!. The article shows how a 100-line CSS style sheet gives you the same formatted version of W3C's Webarch as the 1000-line XSL style sheet by using Prince."

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DesktopLinux.com, the first public beta of Opera 8 is available for free download. It adds voice input/output and a host of other niceties. Key new features include improved RSS handling, fit to window or paper width, a start-bar for easy access to the most commonly used functions, and automatic update checks. The beta release supports Windows only, but a general release is scheduled for early 2005. Opera and IBM have partnered on XHTML+Voice (X+V) technology for several years, co-announcing a Multimodal Browser and Toolkit early in 2003."

Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

Kookus writes "Which party has the best team of web deployers/developers? Neither main page passes w3c's html validator, but Kerry's has much fewer "errors". These pages do not seem to do well on Bobby either... Both seem to be using Akamai's HTTP Acceleration/Mirror service which appears to be running linux, Granted that it is hard to please everyone; which team is doing the best job?"

Manuzhai writes "Tim Bray, of XML co-invention fame, is writing about software patents and Open Source software today. While he deprecates the 'business-method' patents like one-click ordering, he thinks some (Open) source code could tell the truth about a patent application: 'In fact, in an ideal world, I'd rewrite the law to allow software patents but require a working Open-Source implementation as a condition of getting one.'"

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly. Mono: A Developer's Handbook author Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein pages 278 publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc. rating 8 reviewer vertigo ISBN 0596007922 summary An introduction to programming with Mono

When learning a new language such as C#, or working with a new development environment such as Mono, it usually takes some time before you get up to speed in developing programs. Wading through the reference documentation and reading other people's source code often provides much-needed information on how to do certain things. Both, however, are very time consuming and tedious.

Enter Mono: A Developer's Notebook. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters which are thin on theory, but rich on practical content and example code. The featured code snippets are, in contrast to ones in books that teach theory and concepts, not solely designed to illustrate a specific theoretical aspect of programming. Each one is designed to perform a useful task that is essential in day-to-day application programming. What sets this book apart from the multitude of .NET books already available on the market? In order to answer this question it is neccesary to provide a short introduction on Mono.

Mono is essentially an open source cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework and implements the API's which are standardized by ECMA. It is, however, not an exact clone. Besides providing a (partially implemented) stack that provides compatibility with Microsoft's .NET API's, Mono adds a whole new API-stack of its own, consisting of open source technologies such as the Gtk+ toolkit and the Gecko HTML rendering engine. This makes it possible to develop cross-platform applications based on open source technology while (mostly) compiling from a single code-base. In contrast to most .NET books available on the market, which focus primarily on Microsoft's API's in the context of Visual Studio.NET, this book concentrates on the basic ECMA API's and Mono's own open source stack. A complete coverage of .NET and the Mono architecture is outside of this review's scope, so for more information you are advised to check the Mono Project's website.

Before we dive deeper into the content of the book, a short introduction on the Developer's Notebook series by O'Reilly may be useful. The books in this series are styled to resemble the kind of notebooks college students carry around during their classes in which to take notes or, more commonly, draw caricatures of their teachers. The 'notebook' theme persists throughout the look-and-feel of the book. The 278-page thick paperback has a glossy blue cover, complete with faux post-it note and coffee-stains. Inside, the pages are not clean white but lined like the pages found in math notebooks. In the margin, useful comments are scribbled in a font that resembles handwriting. At first I suspected that the 'busy' look would distract from the content, but in practice this was no problem, thanks to the thick black typewriter font in which the bulk of the text is printed.

The chapters in this book are referred to as labs. Each of them focuses on a specific set of tasks and/or features and is divided into several paragraphs. Most paragraphs consist of a number of standard sections following a rigid formula that help you understand a certain aspect of working with Mono. The most common sections are:

• How do I do that?: Often using a liberal amount of practical code, this section shows how to accomplish the task at hand, for example working with files.
• How it works: In this section, the code and concepts involved in the previous section are explained more in depth, step by step.
• What about...: Offers a short focus on more advanced topics or pitfalls.
• Where to learn more: If you are craving more information after reading the previous sections, you are often offered a helping hand on where to find more information, providing url's to relevant documentation such as MSDN and other websites.

The first chapter, Getting Mono Running, describes how to get Mono up and running on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, and how to compile from source on other platforms. The installation instructions for Windows only describe how to install Mono and Gtk#. Integration of Gtk# only in an existing Visual Studio.Net installation falls outside of the scope of the book, but a recent blog entry offers some hints on how to accomplish this. Besides installation, the first chapter offers a short description of the individual tools that make up the mono development. After installation, you will want some kind of editor or IDE to work with. Both the MonoDevelop IDE and several other ways of integrating Mono into your existing environment as a Java or Windows developer are covered. Finally, the community is an important aspect of every open source project. Ways of interacting with the community as well as a guide on how to submit bugs and links to some working Mono/C# applications are part of this chapter.

The C# introduction in the second chapter, Getting Started with C#, is tailored towards people who have at least some proficiency in using an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java. Some differences between C#, Java and C++ are discussed, as well as the differences between value- and reference types, the basics of error handling, working with assemblies and more. Concepts such as classes, methods, inheritance and namespaces are assumed to be known territory. If you have no previous programming experience, Mono: A Developer's Notebook is only useful in combination with a book that teaches programming with C# such as The C# Programming Language by Anders Hejlsberg.

An important part of any modern language is its class libraries. The third chapter, Core .NET, provides an introduction to the standard Framework Library Classes, which describes essential everyday tasks that are part of every program, such as working with files, strings, searching for text patterns and handling collections of data. Besides those basic functions, the chapter also dives deeper into the internals of a compiled assembly, the handling of processes and easy multitasking using threads. Finally, the last paragraph explains how to use a .NET version of the JUnit Java Unit testing framework, Nunit, to test your code.

Developing Gtk-applications with Mono and C# is remarkably easy. Chapter 4, Gtk#, describes the basics of writing Gtk# applications. First, it's neccesary to remark that Gtk# might be a bit of a misnomer. Besides the raw Gtk+ toolkit functionality, Gtk# also includes most of the Gnome libraries like gconf, the gnome canvas, libglade and more. Chapter 4 describes functionality available in the Gtk namespace, the basic Gtk+ toolkit. Gtk+ is a constraints-based toolkit, which means that widgets are not positioned using absolute pixel coordinates but rather on basis of their logical relation to each other. This can be a bit confusing for novices, but this chapter provides a good introduction to the basic principles of writing layouts using Gtk#. The authors provide descriptions of essential operations that almost every application needs, such as creating menus and drawing pixmaps (or more advanced things like using the treeview widget and drag-and-drop), assisted by easy-to-read code snippets.

While chapter 4 introduces basic Gtk# functionality, chapter 5, Advanced Gtk#, delves deeper into more advanced features of the Gtk# library which also include functionality outside of the basic Gtk-namespace, such as the Gnome libraries. Working with Gnome button toolbars, the Glade user interface designer, storing your application settings in Gconf, setting up some preferences through the use of a wizard/druid, asynchronous operations and threading to increase responsiveness of your application while performing background tasks, rendering HTML in your application using the Gecko rendering engine and internationalisation and translation of applications are all described in this chapter.

The use of XML is tightly integrated throughout the Mono framework. It is, for example, the underlying format of the messages that web services use to communicate using the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. The 6th chapter, Processing XML, describes the XML functionality available in Mono. It starts off by simple operations, reading and writing to an XML-file using relevant examples such as RSS and Dashboard clue-packets. It then proceeds to describe how to modify XML in memory, how to navigate and transform XML using Xpath and XSLT, how to constrain XML in several ways and how to serialize and deserialize objects into and from their XML representation. As in previous chapters, the information density is very high so it might take several reads to grok everything explained. The code examples and accompanying text however are very clear and concise.

The 7th chapter called Networking, Remoting, and Web Services describes the networking functionality available in Mono. The chapter starts off with ASP.NET. Mono's stand-alone XSP webserver and Apache integration with mod_mono are discussed, as well as the basics of writing a web application using ASP.NET's code-behind functionality which enables web applications to completely seperate presentation from the underlying code. Communication using plain tcp/ip, remoting using binary serialized objects and invoking remote procedures using XML-RPC as an alternative to SOAP are also described in this chapter. You might want to encrypt the data you send over the network, so a basic description of the Mono cryptographic API is provided. Finally, a short introduction to database handling using ADO.NET concludes chapter 7.

The 8th and last chapter titled Cutting Edge Mono starts off with an introduction on how to use the GNU Automake, Autoconf and the pkg-config tools to create an easy to build source package of your project. It then proceeds to describe various pitfalls and considerations in case you want to write cross-platform applications using Mono, such as filesystem layout, configuration storage and the calling of native code using p/invoke. A particularly cool project is IKVM, which translates Java bytecode into the Common Intermediate Language bytecode Mono uses. This enables Mono to run Java applications and allows Java and Mono code to inter-operate. A short introduction on the use of IKVM is provided, as well as some code examples on how to call Mono assemblies from Java and use the Java class libraries from within Mono applications. The chapter ends with some other cutting-edge functionality, like how to run a development version of Mono, a preview of the Generics (templates in c++) implementation available as featured in C# 2.0 and how to write Mono programs in Basic.

What is missing? The book doesn't contain a reference section on any of the described API's. If you need detailed information on the C# language specification or an API reference you will need to consult external resources such as the documentation provided with Mono, MSDN, or a separate book covering the topic to make optimal use of the information contained in this book. Fortunately, the book kindly provides pointers on where to find those. The information-density is much higher than you would expect from a book this size. This means the information contained in it is terse. Many topics are treated in a only a couple of pages and the book doesn't take time to explain a lot of programming concepts. The information gets you 'on the road' quickly however, which is exactly what this book is supposed to do.

The strength of this book is that it fills the gap between the earlier-mentioned reference documentation and the need to go out and try to read sourcecode to find out how a particular thing is done. The writing style is clear, concise and neutral. Some topics are clarified by the use of screenshots, which is especially useful in the chapters dealing with Gtk# widgets. All in all, if you are a developer with previous experience in object-oriented programming, Mono: A Developer's Notebook will provide you with an excellent introduction into many of the aspects of working with Mono, its associated libraries and programs.

More information and a sample chapter can be found at the book's homepage.

You can purchase Mono: A Developer's Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly. Mono: A Developer's Handbook author Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein pages 278 publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc. rating 8 reviewer vertigo ISBN 0596007922 summary An introduction to programming with Mono

When learning a new language such as C#, or working with a new development environment such as Mono, it usually takes some time before you get up to speed in developing programs. Wading through the reference documentation and reading other people's source code often provides much-needed information on how to do certain things. Both, however, are very time consuming and tedious.

Enter Mono: A Developer's Notebook. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters which are thin on theory, but rich on practical content and example code. The featured code snippets are, in contrast to ones in books that teach theory and concepts, not solely designed to illustrate a specific theoretical aspect of programming. Each one is designed to perform a useful task that is essential in day-to-day application programming. What sets this book apart from the multitude of .NET books already available on the market? In order to answer this question it is neccesary to provide a short introduction on Mono.

Mono is essentially an open source cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework and implements the API's which are standardized by ECMA. It is, however, not an exact clone. Besides providing a (partially implemented) stack that provides compatibility with Microsoft's .NET API's, Mono adds a whole new API-stack of its own, consisting of open source technologies such as the Gtk+ toolkit and the Gecko HTML rendering engine. This makes it possible to develop cross-platform applications based on open source technology while (mostly) compiling from a single code-base. In contrast to most .NET books available on the market, which focus primarily on Microsoft's API's in the context of Visual Studio.NET, this book concentrates on the basic ECMA API's and Mono's own open source stack. A complete coverage of .NET and the Mono architecture is outside of this review's scope, so for more information you are advised to check the Mono Project's website.

Before we dive deeper into the content of the book, a short introduction on the Developer's Notebook series by O'Reilly may be useful. The books in this series are styled to resemble the kind of notebooks college students carry around during their classes in which to take notes or, more commonly, draw caricatures of their teachers. The 'notebook' theme persists throughout the look-and-feel of the book. The 278-page thick paperback has a glossy blue cover, complete with faux post-it note and coffee-stains. Inside, the pages are not clean white but lined like the pages found in math notebooks. In the margin, useful comments are scribbled in a font that resembles handwriting. At first I suspected that the 'busy' look would distract from the content, but in practice this was no problem, thanks to the thick black typewriter font in which the bulk of the text is printed.

The chapters in this book are referred to as labs. Each of them focuses on a specific set of tasks and/or features and is divided into several paragraphs. Most paragraphs consist of a number of standard sections following a rigid formula that help you understand a certain aspect of working with Mono. The most common sections are:

• How do I do that?: Often using a liberal amount of practical code, this section shows how to accomplish the task at hand, for example working with files.
• How it works: In this section, the code and concepts involved in the previous section are explained more in depth, step by step.
• What about...: Offers a short focus on more advanced topics or pitfalls.
• Where to learn more: If you are craving more information after reading the previous sections, you are often offered a helping hand on where to find more information, providing url's to relevant documentation such as MSDN and other websites.

The first chapter, Getting Mono Running, describes how to get Mono up and running on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, and how to compile from source on other platforms. The installation instructions for Windows only describe how to install Mono and Gtk#. Integration of Gtk# only in an existing Visual Studio.Net installation falls outside of the scope of the book, but a recent blog entry offers some hints on how to accomplish this. Besides installation, the first chapter offers a short description of the individual tools that make up the mono development. After installation, you will want some kind of editor or IDE to work with. Both the MonoDevelop IDE and several other ways of integrating Mono into your existing environment as a Java or Windows developer are covered. Finally, the community is an important aspect of every open source project. Ways of interacting with the community as well as a guide on how to submit bugs and links to some working Mono/C# applications are part of this chapter.

The C# introduction in the second chapter, Getting Started with C#, is tailored towards people who have at least some proficiency in using an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java. Some differences between C#, Java and C++ are discussed, as well as the differences between value- and reference types, the basics of error handling, working with assemblies and more. Concepts such as classes, methods, inheritance and namespaces are assumed to be known territory. If you have no previous programming experience, Mono: A Developer's Notebook is only useful in combination with a book that teaches programming with C# such as The C# Programming Language by Anders Hejlsberg.

An important part of any modern language is its class libraries. The third chapter, Core .NET, provides an introduction to the standard Framework Library Classes, which describes essential everyday tasks that are part of every program, such as working with files, strings, searching for text patterns and handling collections of data. Besides those basic functions, the chapter also dives deeper into the internals of a compiled assembly, the handling of processes and easy multitasking using threads. Finally, the last paragraph explains how to use a .NET version of the JUnit Java Unit testing framework, Nunit, to test your code.

Developing Gtk-applications with Mono and C# is remarkably easy. Chapter 4, Gtk#, describes the basics of writing Gtk# applications. First, it's neccesary to remark that Gtk# might be a bit of a misnomer. Besides the raw Gtk+ toolkit functionality, Gtk# also includes most of the Gnome libraries like gconf, the gnome canvas, libglade and more. Chapter 4 describes functionality available in the Gtk namespace, the basic Gtk+ toolkit. Gtk+ is a constraints-based toolkit, which means that widgets are not positioned using absolute pixel coordinates but rather on basis of their logical relation to each other. This can be a bit confusing for novices, but this chapter provides a good introduction to the basic principles of writing layouts using Gtk#. The authors provide descriptions of essential operations that almost every application needs, such as creating menus and drawing pixmaps (or more advanced things like using the treeview widget and drag-and-drop), assisted by easy-to-read code snippets.

While chapter 4 introduces basic Gtk# functionality, chapter 5, Advanced Gtk#, delves deeper into more advanced features of the Gtk# library which also include functionality outside of the basic Gtk-namespace, such as the Gnome libraries. Working with Gnome button toolbars, the Glade user interface designer, storing your application settings in Gconf, setting up some preferences through the use of a wizard/druid, asynchronous operations and threading to increase responsiveness of your application while performing background tasks, rendering HTML in your application using the Gecko rendering engine and internationalisation and translation of applications are all described in this chapter.

The use of XML is tightly integrated throughout the Mono framework. It is, for example, the underlying format of the messages that web services use to communicate using the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. The 6th chapter, Processing XML, describes the XML functionality available in Mono. It starts off by simple operations, reading and writing to an XML-file using relevant examples such as RSS and Dashboard clue-packets. It then proceeds to describe how to modify XML in memory, how to navigate and transform XML using Xpath and XSLT, how to constrain XML in several ways and how to serialize and deserialize objects into and from their XML representation. As in previous chapters, the information density is very high so it might take several reads to grok everything explained. The code examples and accompanying text however are very clear and concise.

The 7th chapter called Networking, Remoting, and Web Services describes the networking functionality available in Mono. The chapter starts off with ASP.NET. Mono's stand-alone XSP webserver and Apache integration with mod_mono are discussed, as well as the basics of writing a web application using ASP.NET's code-behind functionality which enables web applications to completely seperate presentation from the underlying code. Communication using plain tcp/ip, remoting using binary serialized objects and invoking remote procedures using XML-RPC as an alternative to SOAP are also described in this chapter. You might want to encrypt the data you send over the network, so a basic description of the Mono cryptographic API is provided. Finally, a short introduction to database handling using ADO.NET concludes chapter 7.

The 8th and last chapter titled Cutting Edge Mono starts off with an introduction on how to use the GNU Automake, Autoconf and the pkg-config tools to create an easy to build source package of your project. It then proceeds to describe various pitfalls and considerations in case you want to write cross-platform applications using Mono, such as filesystem layout, configuration storage and the calling of native code using p/invoke. A particularly cool project is IKVM, which translates Java bytecode into the Common Intermediate Language bytecode Mono uses. This enables Mono to run Java applications and allows Java and Mono code to inter-operate. A short introduction on the use of IKVM is provided, as well as some code examples on how to call Mono assemblies from Java and use the Java class libraries from within Mono applications. The chapter ends with some other cutting-edge functionality, like how to run a development version of Mono, a preview of the Generics (templates in c++) implementation available as featured in C# 2.0 and how to write Mono programs in Basic.

What is missing? The book doesn't contain a reference section on any of the described API's. If you need detailed information on the C# language specification or an API reference you will need to consult external resources such as the documentation provided with Mono, MSDN, or a separate book covering the topic to make optimal use of the information contained in this book. Fortunately, the book kindly provides pointers on where to find those. The information-density is much higher than you would expect from a book this size. This means the information contained in it is terse. Many topics are treated in a only a couple of pages and the book doesn't take time to explain a lot of programming concepts. The information gets you 'on the road' quickly however, which is exactly what this book is supposed to do.

The strength of this book is that it fills the gap between the earlier-mentioned reference documentation and the need to go out and try to read sourcecode to find out how a particular thing is done. The writing style is clear, concise and neutral. Some topics are clarified by the use of screenshots, which is especially useful in the chapters dealing with Gtk# widgets. All in all, if you are a developer with previous experience in object-oriented programming, Mono: A Developer's Notebook will provide you with an excellent introduction into many of the aspects of working with Mono, its associated libraries and programs.

More information and a sample chapter can be found at the book's homepage.

You can purchase Mono: A Developer's Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly. Mono: A Developer's Handbook author Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein pages 278 publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc. rating 8 reviewer vertigo ISBN 0596007922 summary An introduction to programming with Mono

When learning a new language such as C#, or working with a new development environment such as Mono, it usually takes some time before you get up to speed in developing programs. Wading through the reference documentation and reading other people's source code often provides much-needed information on how to do certain things. Both, however, are very time consuming and tedious.

Enter Mono: A Developer's Notebook. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters which are thin on theory, but rich on practical content and example code. The featured code snippets are, in contrast to ones in books that teach theory and concepts, not solely designed to illustrate a specific theoretical aspect of programming. Each one is designed to perform a useful task that is essential in day-to-day application programming. What sets this book apart from the multitude of .NET books already available on the market? In order to answer this question it is neccesary to provide a short introduction on Mono.

Mono is essentially an open source cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework and implements the API's which are standardized by ECMA. It is, however, not an exact clone. Besides providing a (partially implemented) stack that provides compatibility with Microsoft's .NET API's, Mono adds a whole new API-stack of its own, consisting of open source technologies such as the Gtk+ toolkit and the Gecko HTML rendering engine. This makes it possible to develop cross-platform applications based on open source technology while (mostly) compiling from a single code-base. In contrast to most .NET books available on the market, which focus primarily on Microsoft's API's in the context of Visual Studio.NET, this book concentrates on the basic ECMA API's and Mono's own open source stack. A complete coverage of .NET and the Mono architecture is outside of this review's scope, so for more information you are advised to check the Mono Project's website.

Before we dive deeper into the content of the book, a short introduction on the Developer's Notebook series by O'Reilly may be useful. The books in this series are styled to resemble the kind of notebooks college students carry around during their classes in which to take notes or, more commonly, draw caricatures of their teachers. The 'notebook' theme persists throughout the look-and-feel of the book. The 278-page thick paperback has a glossy blue cover, complete with faux post-it note and coffee-stains. Inside, the pages are not clean white but lined like the pages found in math notebooks. In the margin, useful comments are scribbled in a font that resembles handwriting. At first I suspected that the 'busy' look would distract from the content, but in practice this was no problem, thanks to the thick black typewriter font in which the bulk of the text is printed.

The chapters in this book are referred to as labs. Each of them focuses on a specific set of tasks and/or features and is divided into several paragraphs. Most paragraphs consist of a number of standard sections following a rigid formula that help you understand a certain aspect of working with Mono. The most common sections are:

• How do I do that?: Often using a liberal amount of practical code, this section shows how to accomplish the task at hand, for example working with files.
• How it works: In this section, the code and concepts involved in the previous section are explained more in depth, step by step.
• What about...: Offers a short focus on more advanced topics or pitfalls.
• Where to learn more: If you are craving more information after reading the previous sections, you are often offered a helping hand on where to find more information, providing url's to relevant documentation such as MSDN and other websites.

The first chapter, Getting Mono Running, describes how to get Mono up and running on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, and how to compile from source on other platforms. The installation instructions for Windows only describe how to install Mono and Gtk#. Integration of Gtk# only in an existing Visual Studio.Net installation falls outside of the scope of the book, but a recent blog entry offers some hints on how to accomplish this. Besides installation, the first chapter offers a short description of the individual tools that make up the mono development. After installation, you will want some kind of editor or IDE to work with. Both the MonoDevelop IDE and several other ways of integrating Mono into your existing environment as a Java or Windows developer are covered. Finally, the community is an important aspect of every open source project. Ways of interacting with the community as well as a guide on how to submit bugs and links to some working Mono/C# applications are part of this chapter.

The C# introduction in the second chapter, Getting Started with C#, is tailored towards people who have at least some proficiency in using an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java. Some differences between C#, Java and C++ are discussed, as well as the differences between value- and reference types, the basics of error handling, working with assemblies and more. Concepts such as classes, methods, inheritance and namespaces are assumed to be known territory. If you have no previous programming experience, Mono: A Developer's Notebook is only useful in combination with a book that teaches programming with C# such as The C# Programming Language by Anders Hejlsberg.

An important part of any modern language is its class libraries. The third chapter, Core .NET, provides an introduction to the standard Framework Library Classes, which describes essential everyday tasks that are part of every program, such as working with files, strings, searching for text patterns and handling collections of data. Besides those basic functions, the chapter also dives deeper into the internals of a compiled assembly, the handling of processes and easy multitasking using threads. Finally, the last paragraph explains how to use a .NET version of the JUnit Java Unit testing framework, Nunit, to test your code.

Developing Gtk-applications with Mono and C# is remarkably easy. Chapter 4, Gtk#, describes the basics of writing Gtk# applications. First, it's neccesary to remark that Gtk# might be a bit of a misnomer. Besides the raw Gtk+ toolkit functionality, Gtk# also includes most of the Gnome libraries like gconf, the gnome canvas, libglade and more. Chapter 4 describes functionality available in the Gtk namespace, the basic Gtk+ toolkit. Gtk+ is a constraints-based toolkit, which means that widgets are not positioned using absolute pixel coordinates but rather on basis of their logical relation to each other. This can be a bit confusing for novices, but this chapter provides a good introduction to the basic principles of writing layouts using Gtk#. The authors provide descriptions of essential operations that almost every application needs, such as creating menus and drawing pixmaps (or more advanced things like using the treeview widget and drag-and-drop), assisted by easy-to-read code snippets.

While chapter 4 introduces basic Gtk# functionality, chapter 5, Advanced Gtk#, delves deeper into more advanced features of the Gtk# library which also include functionality outside of the basic Gtk-namespace, such as the Gnome libraries. Working with Gnome button toolbars, the Glade user interface designer, storing your application settings in Gconf, setting up some preferences through the use of a wizard/druid, asynchronous operations and threading to increase responsiveness of your application while performing background tasks, rendering HTML in your application using the Gecko rendering engine and internationalisation and translation of applications are all described in this chapter.

The use of XML is tightly integrated throughout the Mono framework. It is, for example, the underlying format of the messages that web services use to communicate using the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. The 6th chapter, Processing XML, describes the XML functionality available in Mono. It starts off by simple operations, reading and writing to an XML-file using relevant examples such as RSS and Dashboard clue-packets. It then proceeds to describe how to modify XML in memory, how to navigate and transform XML using Xpath and XSLT, how to constrain XML in several ways and how to serialize and deserialize objects into and from their XML representation. As in previous chapters, the information density is very high so it might take several reads to grok everything explained. The code examples and accompanying text however are very clear and concise.

The 7th chapter called Networking, Remoting, and Web Services describes the networking functionality available in Mono. The chapter starts off with ASP.NET. Mono's stand-alone XSP webserver and Apache integration with mod_mono are discussed, as well as the basics of writing a web application using ASP.NET's code-behind functionality which enables web applications to completely seperate presentation from the underlying code. Communication using plain tcp/ip, remoting using binary serialized objects and invoking remote procedures using XML-RPC as an alternative to SOAP are also described in this chapter. You might want to encrypt the data you send over the network, so a basic description of the Mono cryptographic API is provided. Finally, a short introduction to database handling using ADO.NET concludes chapter 7.

The 8th and last chapter titled Cutting Edge Mono starts off with an introduction on how to use the GNU Automake, Autoconf and the pkg-config tools to create an easy to build source package of your project. It then proceeds to describe various pitfalls and considerations in case you want to write cross-platform applications using Mono, such as filesystem layout, configuration storage and the calling of native code using p/invoke. A particularly cool project is IKVM, which translates Java bytecode into the Common Intermediate Language bytecode Mono uses. This enables Mono to run Java applications and allows Java and Mono code to inter-operate. A short introduction on the use of IKVM is provided, as well as some code examples on how to call Mono assemblies from Java and use the Java class libraries from within Mono applications. The chapter ends with some other cutting-edge functionality, like how to run a development version of Mono, a preview of the Generics (templates in c++) implementation available as featured in C# 2.0 and how to write Mono programs in Basic.

What is missing? The book doesn't contain a reference section on any of the described API's. If you need detailed information on the C# language specification or an API reference you will need to consult external resources such as the documentation provided with Mono, MSDN, or a separate book covering the topic to make optimal use of the information contained in this book. Fortunately, the book kindly provides pointers on where to find those. The information-density is much higher than you would expect from a book this size. This means the information contained in it is terse. Many topics are treated in a only a couple of pages and the book doesn't take time to explain a lot of programming concepts. The information gets you 'on the road' quickly however, which is exactly what this book is supposed to do.

The strength of this book is that it fills the gap between the earlier-mentioned reference documentation and the need to go out and try to read sourcecode to find out how a particular thing is done. The writing style is clear, concise and neutral. Some topics are clarified by the use of screenshots, which is especially useful in the chapters dealing with Gtk# widgets. All in all, if you are a developer with previous experience in object-oriented programming, Mono: A Developer's Notebook will provide you with an excellent introduction into many of the aspects of working with Mono, its associated libraries and programs.

More information and a sample chapter can be found at the book's homepage.

You can purchase Mono: A Developer's Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "

ChilliNuts writes "The VoiceXML Forum has announced the launch of its VoiceXML Platform Certification Program, in a bid to enforce cross-vendor conformance to VoiceXML 2.0, W3C's XML-based Voice Recognition language. Many Voice Recognition companies have been adopting VoiceXML in the past two years, and this is due to strengthened expectations that it will soon become industry standard. Good news for developers. Plus further proof that Open Standards work! Here's the Press Release"

theodp writes "To be able to reject the Eolas browser plug-in patent a second time, the USPTO had to add the teachings of G.Toye after Eolas' response prompted the examiner to withdraw his previous finding that was based solely on the teachings of the W3C's Dave Raggett and Tim Berners-Lee. It's unclear where the Toye prior art came from, since the W3C didn't offer it when it asked the PTO to overturn the patent. Also, a newly available document reveals that the W3C's widely-publicized prior art filing, which was hastily made without community input, differed little from an unpublicized filing that was made weeks earlier by attorneys from Microsoft and AOL."

An anonymous reader writes "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs). However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated. There is, of course, an animated version of PNG, MNG, but few programs can view these images (mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it). But there may be an answer coming: Vladimir Vukicevic and Stuart 'Pavlov' Parmenter (of Mozilla fame) have put together a specification for APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics)." (Read more below.)

"Unlike MNG, APNG is not a separate file format, but rather an extension to PNG. Thus, APNG images are just normal PNG images (with the .png extension) but can be animated. The system is fully backwards-compatable, so any program that can open a PNG image will be able to open an APNG image (though non-APNG viewers will only show the first frame). Vitally, the decoder just adds an extra few kilobytes onto a standard PNG decoder. APNG support is in the process of being checked into Mozilla. Hopefully, other programs will follow suit."

AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."

AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."

AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "In Volume I of The PHP Anthology, Harry Fuecks showed some of the basic PHP functionality to solve a few simple problems, including how to object-orient your code, how to use PHP's hundreds of built-in functions, and how to use well-developed existing classes, be they from PEAR or other sites. In Volume II, he intends to 'blow your socks off by tackling some traditionally complex problems with the same principles--to great effect.' It's summertime and I'm sandals-only for the time being, so my socks remain safely in the top drawer. But the volume is nonetheless exciting." (Read on for the rest of Leingang's review, and check out last week's review of Volume I.)

There are seven chapters in this volume, each dealing with real-world problems. Many problems are those you've seen solved on sites you admire and wondered "How did they do that?" Others are frameworks that allow your site to run smoothly, with nobody getting accidentally logged out or having to wait too long while your script gluttonously pulls the same data out of the database for the Nth time. At the end, Fuecks goes back to the beginning, to show how proper design and development can save you time when you start your next project.

Chapter 1: Access Control
Authentication is the process by which users identify themselves. This is difficult in HTTP, a stateless protocol in which the server handles one request at a time and instantly forgets you. Luckily HTTP allows cookies, which are bits of data the server sends to the client for to reveal upon revisiting. At first cookies were used only to annoy ("Hello, Steve! You have visited this page 3 times"), but a cookie can hold the ID of a session record in a database, which contains any state-information that you like.

You can authenticate without sessions via HTTP server configuration, as long as you like the dull dialog box the browser pops up when users enter a restricted area. Oh, and you don't mind the fact that users won't be able to "log out" without quitting their browser, nor can you force a logout after a certain timeout value. Nor can you allow users to register themselves... these are all existing, solved problems and the author shows some of the best solutions. Common tasks like allowing users to change their passwords, recover their passwords if (I mean when) they forget them, and arranging users in groups to which you assign common permissions are also covered.

My favorite example from this chapter is the humans-only registration application. Remember when online voting for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game first started? Anyone who knew how to write a web client could have automated a task to vote as many times as the server could handle, and have his favorite players be the all-star team.* To bring it closer to home, what if somebody decides to bog down your site by automatically registering a huge number of times and filling up your database? You can keep these things from happening by making users look at images which contain text but are hard for computers to "read." PHP is in use at all stages of this game, from writing the registration form's HTML to generating the obscured image on-the-fly.

Chapter 2: XML
XML is a fact of life and, hype aside, is a great way to store and transmit machine-readable data. One of the most visible applications is the thousands of bloggers and news sites providing XML feeds of their headlines. You can write portal sites that grab these headlines, parse them all and present them on your site with links to the full text at the source.

There are two ways to parse XML: with events, or by using the Document Object Model (DOM). The methodologies are similar to reading a plain-text file line-by-line or all at once. Using events you can implement a finite-state machine based on which tags and text come down the pike. Or you can slurp the whole document into memory and find any part of it with ease. The built-in library for the former is based on the popular Simple API for XML (or SAX; don't you like those nested acronyms?), while the latter often uses Xpath to find the particular document nodes you want.

The author shows how to parse RSS feeds with both SAX and the DOM, and how to render a feed with DOM. Further, you can use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (known as XSLT) to transform XML -- whether it's to XHTML for regular browser reading, WML (Wireless Markup Language) for viewing on mobile phones, or even SQL to communicate with a database.

Another exciting XML application is in the area of web services, in which agents (often but not necessarily web servers) communicate with each other over an XML-based protocol built on top of PHP. The two most popular protocols are XML-RPC (the RPC stands for "Remote Procedure Calls") and SOAP (which used to stand for "Simple Object Access Protocol" but now is just a name). Often-changing information such as stock prices and weather are often offered through web services, but they can also be used as an object API between agents over the network. What's cool about using SOAP is you can publish to clients exactly what services you offer and how they can call them using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

Chapter 3: Alternative Content Types
If you've ever printed out a web page that was designed for browser viewing, you know the less-than-desired effect. The navigational elements, search boxes, and banners, while necessary for the web page, are useless once a static copy is printed. Furthermore, you need to extend your site to include users with less-featured browsers, such as mobile phones.

Fortunately, PHP has been taught many languages. PDF is the standard for print-quality documents, and there are several libraries (free and non-free) which allow you to generate them. WML is the HTML of cell phone browsers, in which screen space is at a premium and bandwidth scarce. SVG is an XML application which allows vector-based images like PostScript does. The coolest example, however, uses XUL (the XML User interface Language, not to be confused with Zool) to make full GUI applications that you run through Mozilla. This isn't useful for the outside world where you can't force your users to use Mozilla (sigh), but works well for intranet applications that run on a variety of platforms.

The author also brings up in this chapter an HTML SAX parser he has written. You can process HTML pages chunk-by-chunk and extract the pieces you want. I hadn't known about such a class until I read the book and I'm very excited I know about it now. For sometimes it's necessary to parse a web page meant for humans to read (perhaps to pretend to be a user and automate your all-star voting), and most HTML pages won't validate as HTML, let alone XML.

A good point here is that a well-designed, tiered application will allow you to swap out different presentation classes with little code rewrite. Separating the tasks of extracting the data from the database and presenting to the user in variety of formats is a common task that when done right becomes subsequently easier.

Chapter 4: Stats and Tracking
Once your site is up and running, you'll be interested to know which parts are the most active, and how much traffic you're getting. Into a dynamic page you can obviously insert any logging mechanism, but a great place to put it is inside your site's logo. PHP can send binary data as easily as text. Why would you want to do this?

• The logo is usually on every page (or it should be). You don't have to cut-and-paste code.
• You can serve the image, then use the flush command to send the output on and do extra processing. This way logging doesn't get in the way of page rendering.

There are lots of packages available to collect and analyze data. The author goes through phpOpenTracker which is quite rich in features. There are also ways to collect data on what links users follow to leave your site, and to keep requests from search engines from cluttering your log files.

Chapter 5: Caching
Another possible knock against PHP is that, while it's good to have dynamic pages, some pages are unnecessarily so. This is a waste of server resources to keep rendering the same page anew. There are different ways to conserve.

On the client side, you can use HTTP 1.1 headers like Cache-control and Expires to tell browsers when it's okay to store cached copies locally

On the server side, as can be expected, you have a greater level of control. You can use output buffering to delay sending of output to the browser, then save a copy of the output locally. On subsequent requests, you can serve the file rather than generate the HTML all over again. This can be implemented on a chunk (or block) level, so that you can keep some parts ultra-time sensitive and others not so much. The package PEAR::Cache_Lite can help with this.

Chapter 6: Development Technique
The last two chapters were my favorites of the two-volume set. They are on a higher level of abstraction than the features of PHP's library of functions, or previous five chapters on real-world solutions. After you've reached a certain level of expertise in PHP coding, you being to wonder about the "right" way to do things. The author shows how to use Xdebug to find bottlenecks in your code, as well as a few quick optimization tips (for instance, design your flow control so that the first choice is the one most often taken).

He then discusses the principles of N-tiered design. N is usually 5, but the data layer (usually a database or file system) and presentation layer (usually the browser) are most often handled outside of PHP, so you normally have three levels to worry about:

• Data Access: Getting data from the outside world into your application
• Application Logic: Doing whatever unique thing your application is supposed to do
• Presentation Logic: Forming a response in a format acceptable to your client

Keeping these layers separate and restricting them to communicating through well-defined interfaces allows you maximum flexibility. If you need to change databases (say you just got venture capital money and can afford Oracle now), you can do so only changing one layer. If you want to serve different flavors of HTML, or different markup languages altogether, or binary data, you can do so by only changing one layer. You can even strive for maximum distributability by enabling your layers to "live" on physically independent machines and communicate with XML-RPC or SOAP.

Documenting your code is essential. Anybody who's been programming for over a year has gone back to code he or she's written and thought, "Now what the heck was this supposed to do?" It's even more essential when you write something and wish to distribute it for the benefit of others. You can expect them to grok your code at an even lower rate since they didn't write it the first time.

Luckily, scripted languages like PHP are excellent at parsing text files, including PHP scripts themselves. Using well-defined documentation formats akin to JavaDoc, you can embed documentation in your code inside comments, and use tools like phpDocumentor to extract these documentation blocks and format them as nice, cross-reference HTML. In fact, writing doc blocks before your code is a good way to think ahead about how you want your classes and methods to work.

Unit Testing, one of the most digestible dogmas of Extreme Programming, is an awesome way to test your code for logic errors. You build up tiny test cases (using mock objects to isolate the class you're testing) and build as many as you like. Once you do this (PHPUnit and SimpleTest are two rich frameworks), you keep your tests and each time you add features, you run your test to make sure you haven't added bugs as well.

Chapter 7: Design Patterns
Design Patterns is one of the modern classics in information technology. After having done OOP for a while, you will inevitably get the feeling of deja vu that you've solved a problem before. Not so concretely as "I need a database abstraction layer," or "I need a templating system," but as in "I need a way to create objects without specifying exactly what class they belong to," or "I'm tired of writing so many if statements." Design patterns are common object architectures which can be used to solve common (though unique) problems.

Many design patterns are more suited to state-equipped applications with GUIs, but there are plenty to assist the PHP coder. The Factory Method is a pattern through which an object can create other objects of varying classes. So instead of writing mysql_connect everywhere, then having to change every occurrence of that function, you can abstract all database interaction to a class, then instantiate a database connection through a class method of another class: $db = MyApp::getDatabaseConnection(). This is useful when the connection (not just the RDBMS, but the actual database) you want varies depending on whether you are developing, testing, or going live with your application. Factory methods are also a good way to avoid global configuration variables.

The Iterator Pattern and the Observer Pattern are two others mentioned in this chapter. Iterators are used often in paging through database results. Observers are used to let objects notify other objects of changes in their state. This chapter will make you want to go read the whole Gang-of-Four book if you haven't already.

My biggest beef with the book is that this wasn't presented earlier on, perhaps at the beginning of Volume II. As a climax, it leaves me flat, wondering how the rest of the volume could have been derived from this very cool concept. But most PHP books conclude with chapters on how to extended PHP on the C level, or giant case studies involving massive code dumps, and I'm often not satisfied with them. This is a nice philosophical note to go out on. And there's something to be said for the argument that books like these aren't written to be read cover-to-cover.

Appendices
The book closes with the same indices as in Volume I. Since I don't know the URL of my review of that volume, I'll just copy: You can read about which configuration directives you're probably most interested in (the complete list you can get on PHP's web site), some common security breaches, and how to install PEAR, PHP's version of CPAN. My favorite appendix is the "Hosting Provider Checklist," a great reference for evaluating whether kewlhosting.com is going to give you the freedom and support you need to make a great hosted web site.

This volume was informative, well-written, and inspirational in that it made me want to go out and add cool and useful features to my web sites. Check it out if you can.

*Not really (not that I tried or anything), but they've always been a little bit smarter about it. You get my point, though. This did happen on an ESPN.com Page 2 mascot popularity contest, but they noticed through request headers that millions of votes were coming from the same place, and invalidated all those votes.

In real life, Matthew Leingang is Preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. He promises to review any book sent to him for free, and sometimes actually does it. Both volumes of The PHP Anthology are available from SitePoint. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews; to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "In Volume I of The PHP Anthology, Harry Fuecks showed some of the basic PHP functionality to solve a few simple problems, including how to object-orient your code, how to use PHP's hundreds of built-in functions, and how to use well-developed existing classes, be they from PEAR or other sites. In Volume II, he intends to 'blow your socks off by tackling some traditionally complex problems with the same principles--to great effect.' It's summertime and I'm sandals-only for the time being, so my socks remain safely in the top drawer. But the volume is nonetheless exciting." (Read on for the rest of Leingang's review, and check out last week's review of Volume I.)

There are seven chapters in this volume, each dealing with real-world problems. Many problems are those you've seen solved on sites you admire and wondered "How did they do that?" Others are frameworks that allow your site to run smoothly, with nobody getting accidentally logged out or having to wait too long while your script gluttonously pulls the same data out of the database for the Nth time. At the end, Fuecks goes back to the beginning, to show how proper design and development can save you time when you start your next project.

Chapter 1: Access Control
Authentication is the process by which users identify themselves. This is difficult in HTTP, a stateless protocol in which the server handles one request at a time and instantly forgets you. Luckily HTTP allows cookies, which are bits of data the server sends to the client for to reveal upon revisiting. At first cookies were used only to annoy ("Hello, Steve! You have visited this page 3 times"), but a cookie can hold the ID of a session record in a database, which contains any state-information that you like.

You can authenticate without sessions via HTTP server configuration, as long as you like the dull dialog box the browser pops up when users enter a restricted area. Oh, and you don't mind the fact that users won't be able to "log out" without quitting their browser, nor can you force a logout after a certain timeout value. Nor can you allow users to register themselves... these are all existing, solved problems and the author shows some of the best solutions. Common tasks like allowing users to change their passwords, recover their passwords if (I mean when) they forget them, and arranging users in groups to which you assign common permissions are also covered.

My favorite example from this chapter is the humans-only registration application. Remember when online voting for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game first started? Anyone who knew how to write a web client could have automated a task to vote as many times as the server could handle, and have his favorite players be the all-star team.* To bring it closer to home, what if somebody decides to bog down your site by automatically registering a huge number of times and filling up your database? You can keep these things from happening by making users look at images which contain text but are hard for computers to "read." PHP is in use at all stages of this game, from writing the registration form's HTML to generating the obscured image on-the-fly.

Chapter 2: XML
XML is a fact of life and, hype aside, is a great way to store and transmit machine-readable data. One of the most visible applications is the thousands of bloggers and news sites providing XML feeds of their headlines. You can write portal sites that grab these headlines, parse them all and present them on your site with links to the full text at the source.

There are two ways to parse XML: with events, or by using the Document Object Model (DOM). The methodologies are similar to reading a plain-text file line-by-line or all at once. Using events you can implement a finite-state machine based on which tags and text come down the pike. Or you can slurp the whole document into memory and find any part of it with ease. The built-in library for the former is based on the popular Simple API for XML (or SAX; don't you like those nested acronyms?), while the latter often uses Xpath to find the particular document nodes you want.

The author shows how to parse RSS feeds with both SAX and the DOM, and how to render a feed with DOM. Further, you can use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (known as XSLT) to transform XML -- whether it's to XHTML for regular browser reading, WML (Wireless Markup Language) for viewing on mobile phones, or even SQL to communicate with a database.

Another exciting XML application is in the area of web services, in which agents (often but not necessarily web servers) communicate with each other over an XML-based protocol built on top of PHP. The two most popular protocols are XML-RPC (the RPC stands for "Remote Procedure Calls") and SOAP (which used to stand for "Simple Object Access Protocol" but now is just a name). Often-changing information such as stock prices and weather are often offered through web services, but they can also be used as an object API between agents over the network. What's cool about using SOAP is you can publish to clients exactly what services you offer and how they can call them using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

Chapter 3: Alternative Content Types
If you've ever printed out a web page that was designed for browser viewing, you know the less-than-desired effect. The navigational elements, search boxes, and banners, while necessary for the web page, are useless once a static copy is printed. Furthermore, you need to extend your site to include users with less-featured browsers, such as mobile phones.

Fortunately, PHP has been taught many languages. PDF is the standard for print-quality documents, and there are several libraries (free and non-free) which allow you to generate them. WML is the HTML of cell phone browsers, in which screen space is at a premium and bandwidth scarce. SVG is an XML application which allows vector-based images like PostScript does. The coolest example, however, uses XUL (the XML User interface Language, not to be confused with Zool) to make full GUI applications that you run through Mozilla. This isn't useful for the outside world where you can't force your users to use Mozilla (sigh), but works well for intranet applications that run on a variety of platforms.

The author also brings up in this chapter an HTML SAX parser he has written. You can process HTML pages chunk-by-chunk and extract the pieces you want. I hadn't known about such a class until I read the book and I'm very excited I know about it now. For sometimes it's necessary to parse a web page meant for humans to read (perhaps to pretend to be a user and automate your all-star voting), and most HTML pages won't validate as HTML, let alone XML.

A good point here is that a well-designed, tiered application will allow you to swap out different presentation classes with little code rewrite. Separating the tasks of extracting the data from the database and presenting to the user in variety of formats is a common task that when done right becomes subsequently easier.

Chapter 4: Stats and Tracking
Once your site is up and running, you'll be interested to know which parts are the most active, and how much traffic you're getting. Into a dynamic page you can obviously insert any logging mechanism, but a great place to put it is inside your site's logo. PHP can send binary data as easily as text. Why would you want to do this?

• The logo is usually on every page (or it should be). You don't have to cut-and-paste code.
• You can serve the image, then use the flush command to send the output on and do extra processing. This way logging doesn't get in the way of page rendering.

There are lots of packages available to collect and analyze data. The author goes through phpOpenTracker which is quite rich in features. There are also ways to collect data on what links users follow to leave your site, and to keep requests from search engines from cluttering your log files.

Chapter 5: Caching
Another possible knock against PHP is that, while it's good to have dynamic pages, some pages are unnecessarily so. This is a waste of server resources to keep rendering the same page anew. There are different ways to conserve.

On the client side, you can use HTTP 1.1 headers like Cache-control and Expires to tell browsers when it's okay to store cached copies locally

On the server side, as can be expected, you have a greater level of control. You can use output buffering to delay sending of output to the browser, then save a copy of the output locally. On subsequent requests, you can serve the file rather than generate the HTML all over again. This can be implemented on a chunk (or block) level, so that you can keep some parts ultra-time sensitive and others not so much. The package PEAR::Cache_Lite can help with this.

Chapter 6: Development Technique
The last two chapters were my favorites of the two-volume set. They are on a higher level of abstraction than the features of PHP's library of functions, or previous five chapters on real-world solutions. After you've reached a certain level of expertise in PHP coding, you being to wonder about the "right" way to do things. The author shows how to use Xdebug to find bottlenecks in your code, as well as a few quick optimization tips (for instance, design your flow control so that the first choice is the one most often taken).

He then discusses the principles of N-tiered design. N is usually 5, but the data layer (usually a database or file system) and presentation layer (usually the browser) are most often handled outside of PHP, so you normally have three levels to worry about:

• Data Access: Getting data from the outside world into your application
• Application Logic: Doing whatever unique thing your application is supposed to do
• Presentation Logic: Forming a response in a format acceptable to your client

Keeping these layers separate and restricting them to communicating through well-defined interfaces allows you maximum flexibility. If you need to change databases (say you just got venture capital money and can afford Oracle now), you can do so only changing one layer. If you want to serve different flavors of HTML, or different markup languages altogether, or binary data, you can do so by only changing one layer. You can even strive for maximum distributability by enabling your layers to "live" on physically independent machines and communicate with XML-RPC or SOAP.

Documenting your code is essential. Anybody who's been programming for over a year has gone back to code he or she's written and thought, "Now what the heck was this supposed to do?" It's even more essential when you write something and wish to distribute it for the benefit of others. You can expect them to grok your code at an even lower rate since they didn't write it the first time.

Luckily, scripted languages like PHP are excellent at parsing text files, including PHP scripts themselves. Using well-defined documentation formats akin to JavaDoc, you can embed documentation in your code inside comments, and use tools like phpDocumentor to extract these documentation blocks and format them as nice, cross-reference HTML. In fact, writing doc blocks before your code is a good way to think ahead about how you want your classes and methods to work.

Unit Testing, one of the most digestible dogmas of Extreme Programming, is an awesome way to test your code for logic errors. You build up tiny test cases (using mock objects to isolate the class you're testing) and build as many as you like. Once you do this (PHPUnit and SimpleTest are two rich frameworks), you keep your tests and each time you add features, you run your test to make sure you haven't added bugs as well.

Chapter 7: Design Patterns
Design Patterns is one of the modern classics in information technology. After having done OOP for a while, you will inevitably get the feeling of deja vu that you've solved a problem before. Not so concretely as "I need a database abstraction layer," or "I need a templating system," but as in "I need a way to create objects without specifying exactly what class they belong to," or "I'm tired of writing so many if statements." Design patterns are common object architectures which can be used to solve common (though unique) problems.

Many design patterns are more suited to state-equipped applications with GUIs, but there are plenty to assist the PHP coder. The Factory Method is a pattern through which an object can create other objects of varying classes. So instead of writing mysql_connect everywhere, then having to change every occurrence of that function, you can abstract all database interaction to a class, then instantiate a database connection through a class method of another class: $db = MyApp::getDatabaseConnection(). This is useful when the connection (not just the RDBMS, but the actual database) you want varies depending on whether you are developing, testing, or going live with your application. Factory methods are also a good way to avoid global configuration variables.

The Iterator Pattern and the Observer Pattern are two others mentioned in this chapter. Iterators are used often in paging through database results. Observers are used to let objects notify other objects of changes in their state. This chapter will make you want to go read the whole Gang-of-Four book if you haven't already.

My biggest beef with the book is that this wasn't presented earlier on, perhaps at the beginning of Volume II. As a climax, it leaves me flat, wondering how the rest of the volume could have been derived from this very cool concept. But most PHP books conclude with chapters on how to extended PHP on the C level, or giant case studies involving massive code dumps, and I'm often not satisfied with them. This is a nice philosophical note to go out on. And there's something to be said for the argument that books like these aren't written to be read cover-to-cover.

Appendices
The book closes with the same indices as in Volume I. Since I don't know the URL of my review of that volume, I'll just copy: You can read about which configuration directives you're probably most interested in (the complete list you can get on PHP's web site), some common security breaches, and how to install PEAR, PHP's version of CPAN. My favorite appendix is the "Hosting Provider Checklist," a great reference for evaluating whether kewlhosting.com is going to give you the freedom and support you need to make a great hosted web site.

This volume was informative, well-written, and inspirational in that it made me want to go out and add cool and useful features to my web sites. Check it out if you can.

*Not really (not that I tried or anything), but they've always been a little bit smarter about it. You get my point, though. This did happen on an ESPN.com Page 2 mascot popularity contest, but they noticed through request headers that millions of votes were coming from the same place, and invalidated all those votes.

In real life, Matthew Leingang is Preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. He promises to review any book sent to him for free, and sometimes actually does it. Both volumes of The PHP Anthology are available from SitePoint. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews; to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Da_Slayer writes "The w3's HTML group has released the 6th public working draft for XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is a general-purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements. The draft is located at w3's website. Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. It goes into specifics about embedding MathML, SVG, etc... and has links to tools and resources to help convert existing html documents to xhtml. One of those resources is a document on XML events and its advantages over the onclick style of event handling."

Da_Slayer writes "The w3's HTML group has released the 6th public working draft for XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is a general-purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements. The draft is located at w3's website. Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. It goes into specifics about embedding MathML, SVG, etc... and has links to tools and resources to help convert existing html documents to xhtml. One of those resources is a document on XML events and its advantages over the onclick style of event handling."

Da_Slayer writes "The w3's HTML group has released the 6th public working draft for XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is a general-purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements. The draft is located at w3's website. Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. It goes into specifics about embedding MathML, SVG, etc... and has links to tools and resources to help convert existing html documents to xhtml. One of those resources is a document on XML events and its advantages over the onclick style of event handling."

Da_Slayer writes "The w3's HTML group has released the 6th public working draft for XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is a general-purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements. The draft is located at w3's website. Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. It goes into specifics about embedding MathML, SVG, etc... and has links to tools and resources to help convert existing html documents to xhtml. One of those resources is a document on XML events and its advantages over the onclick style of event handling."

andrew_j_w writes "British born creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee has finally received his Knighthood from the Queen. It's nice to a pioneer, who certainly not a household name, get such a high honour from the establishment. Hopefully more people will now recognise the great work he did!"

claes writes "There is an article "Metadata for the desktop" that suggests that RDF should be used to describe data in desktop environments. This is an interesting idea. RDF is already used by Creative Commons to attach license metadata to its works. Mozilla also supports it. RDF was designed for the web, but can it also find its way to the desktop? And what metadata is most important to describe?"

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software have formed a working group to develop specifications for Web applications. The new Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on specs for Web Forms 2.0, Web Apps 1.0 and Web Controls 1.0, among others. This is being done outside of the W3C, with the hope of getting a viable alternative to Longhorn's XAML available soon. Another reason for working outside the W3C could be the rift between Mozilla/Opera and other W3C members over what technologies Web applications solutions such be based on: Mozilla/Opera favour a backwards-compatible HTML-based standard, others are looking towards to XForms and SVG. It will be interesting to see if any other browser developers jump on board WHATWG." This story builds on our recent story concerning the group.

theodp writes "While news accounts credited Tim Berners-Lee's mighty pen with triggering the USPTO reexam of the Eolas plug-in patent that could negate a $520+ million judgment against Microsoft, newly released USPTO interview notes suggest the reexam may owe more to an alliance of tech giants who appear to have quietly advanced the same arguments to the USPTO weeks prior to Berners-Lee." See also some previous coverage of the Eolas patent circus, and more below about the USPTO reexam.

theodp continues "According to a 4-27 Interview Summary, the USPTO presented Eolas with a 10-14 letter signed by in-house counsel from Microsoft, AOL and Macromedia, a 10-15 letter from Adobe, and a 10-22 letter from the law firm of Sidley Austin (aka Microsoft's lawyers) in connection with its proposed rejection of Eolas' patent claims. All predated the 10-24 letter from the W3C's counsel as well as Berners-Lee's widely-publicized 10-28 letter, which seems unlikely to have prompted the USPTO's detailed 10-30 Reexam Order. The W3C has repeatedly had no comment when asked if the 'newly cited art' provided in its 10-24 filing had already been supplied earlier to the USPTO by others. UPDATE: In response, the W3C's Danny Weitzner points out that the preceding words are mine and should not be confused with those of a distinguished journalist."

theodp writes "While news accounts credited Tim Berners-Lee's mighty pen with triggering the USPTO reexam of the Eolas plug-in patent that could negate a $520+ million judgment against Microsoft, newly released USPTO interview notes suggest the reexam may owe more to an alliance of tech giants who appear to have quietly advanced the same arguments to the USPTO weeks prior to Berners-Lee." See also some previous coverage of the Eolas patent circus, and more below about the USPTO reexam.

theodp continues "According to a 4-27 Interview Summary, the USPTO presented Eolas with a 10-14 letter signed by in-house counsel from Microsoft, AOL and Macromedia, a 10-15 letter from Adobe, and a 10-22 letter from the law firm of Sidley Austin (aka Microsoft's lawyers) in connection with its proposed rejection of Eolas' patent claims. All predated the 10-24 letter from the W3C's counsel as well as Berners-Lee's widely-publicized 10-28 letter, which seems unlikely to have prompted the USPTO's detailed 10-30 Reexam Order. The W3C has repeatedly had no comment when asked if the 'newly cited art' provided in its 10-24 filing had already been supplied earlier to the USPTO by others. UPDATE: In response, the W3C's Danny Weitzner points out that the preceding words are mine and should not be confused with those of a distinguished journalist."

kmccammon writes "Tim Berners-Lee recently released a white paper outlining a number of justifications for stalling (at least temporarily) the expansion of the top-level domains. Among the reasons cited: bad economics. As evidenced by the .biz and .info debacle, more top-levels does not necessarily mean more domain name availability. All it really means is that every .com/.net owner now needs to rush out and buy the same name under each new TLD. Thus, the 'value of one's original registration drops. At the same time, the cost of protecting one's brand goes up.'"

cying writes "Position papers from the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents are now available. The workshop will discuss the W3C's future roadmap for web application standards. Many weighed in, including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Sun, and several mobile companies (including mine)."

cying writes "Position papers from the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents are now available. The workshop will discuss the W3C's future roadmap for web application standards. Many weighed in, including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Sun, and several mobile companies (including mine)."

comforteagle writes "The W3C has upgraded their markup validation service to include easier navigation, official bug tracking support, 'verbose' error messages, fixed output bugs, and improved documentation. Aside from simply using the W3C's site you can download your own version. Mmmm "banana flavor"."

comforteagle writes "The W3C has upgraded their markup validation service to include easier navigation, official bug tracking support, 'verbose' error messages, fixed output bugs, and improved documentation. Aside from simply using the W3C's site you can download your own version. Mmmm "banana flavor"."

comforteagle writes "The W3C has upgraded their markup validation service to include easier navigation, official bug tracking support, 'verbose' error messages, fixed output bugs, and improved documentation. Aside from simply using the W3C's site you can download your own version. Mmmm "banana flavor"."

Simon P. Chappell writes "It used to be that a website could be standards compliant or it could be attractive and impressive to prospective customers, but it could almost never be both. Now with the rise of CSS compliant browsers, a new generation of web designers are finding that the old wisdom is ready to be retired. CSS technology allows a website to have both excellent, semantically indicated content and attractive layouts. Core CSS (2ed.) positions itself as a complete guide to all of this standards based goodness." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review. Core CSS (2nd ed.) author Keith Schengli-Roberts pages 818 (10 page index) publisher Prentice Hall rating 6 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0130092789 summary A flawed diamond

What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS part of the book's title) are a way to separate the content and presentation of a web page. The CSS file holds the presentation instructions, leaving the HTML to hold only the content. While CSS is a formal World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard, the adoption has been somewhat slow, with browsers only reaching full compliance with the base level of the standard within the past year or so. So why is CSS useful? CSS shines when it is used to define the style of a whole site. Want all of your headings to be the right shade of your corporate blue? No problem. Want every page to have the corporate logo on it's background? No problem. Whoops, got bought by GlobalMegaUberCorporation Inc. and need to change the colours and background logos in a hurry? No problem, just change the CSS definitions and your new corporate identity will shine out for all your customers to see. What do I know about CSS? I am a relative newcomer to CSS, having been laying out websites using tables since 1995. I had decided that it was time to learn how to bring my personal website up to speed with the latest standards, when I was offered the chance to review this book, so I took Prentice Hall PTR up on the opportunity. This review then, is from the perspective of one who knows HTML well enough to develop a couple of sites using only vi and who has decided to learn CSS. Overview The back cover blurb claims that Core CSS 2nd Edition is a comprehensive guide that shows both beginning and expert web developers all they need to know to achieve great results with the latest style sheet properties. It also claims to be ... the most complete and up-to-date CSS reference available. This review will explore those two claims. What's To Like The first thing to like about this book is that it does cover almost everything that it's possible to write about Cascading Style Sheets. I have included the table of contents below so that you can get a feel for the breadth that this book aims at covering. The writing style is clear and explanatory with an underlying conversational tone, quite suited to this manner of book. It is also obvious from the text that Mr. Schengli-Roberts does understand his subject matter very well indeed.

The biggest thing to like about this book, for me, is appendix B, an alphabetical listing of the defined CSS properties and values. This list covers 92 pages and is a key part of the whole book. Importantly, it doesn't feel like filler and gives an impression that care has been taken in devising this very useful resource. Each entry in the appendix gives an example of correct usage of each property, which as a CSS neophyte I appreciated greatly.

What's To Consider This book carries a 2004 copyright, yet it feels old when you view the list of browser compatibilities for each property. While it does give compatibility information for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, it only covers Mozilla 1.0, it mentions Konqueror without any version details and completely omits Apple's Safari browser. This spotty coverage seems at odds with the rest of the book and really felt like a glaring omission to me. Summary This is a good book -- and if you're in the process of learning to use Cascading Style Sheets, you should certainly consider it for your collection. It is flawed by a poor selection of browsers for it's compatibility lists; while this may not be an issue for you, I found it quite irksome. This explains my review score and my description of this book as a flawed diamond.

Far more information than most people could ever want to know about Simon P. Chappell is available at his personal website. You can purchase Core CSS (2nd ed.) from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Simon P. Chappell writes "It used to be that a website could be standards compliant or it could be attractive and impressive to prospective customers, but it could almost never be both. Now with the rise of CSS compliant browsers, a new generation of web designers are finding that the old wisdom is ready to be retired. CSS technology allows a website to have both excellent, semantically indicated content and attractive layouts. Core CSS (2ed.) positions itself as a complete guide to all of this standards based goodness." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review. Core CSS (2nd ed.) author Keith Schengli-Roberts pages 818 (10 page index) publisher Prentice Hall rating 6 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0130092789 summary A flawed diamond

What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS part of the book's title) are a way to separate the content and presentation of a web page. The CSS file holds the presentation instructions, leaving the HTML to hold only the content. While CSS is a formal World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard, the adoption has been somewhat slow, with browsers only reaching full compliance with the base level of the standard within the past year or so. So why is CSS useful? CSS shines when it is used to define the style of a whole site. Want all of your headings to be the right shade of your corporate blue? No problem. Want every page to have the corporate logo on it's background? No problem. Whoops, got bought by GlobalMegaUberCorporation Inc. and need to change the colours and background logos in a hurry? No problem, just change the CSS definitions and your new corporate identity will shine out for all your customers to see. What do I know about CSS? I am a relative newcomer to CSS, having been laying out websites using tables since 1995. I had decided that it was time to learn how to bring my personal website up to speed with the latest standards, when I was offered the chance to review this book, so I took Prentice Hall PTR up on the opportunity. This review then, is from the perspective of one who knows HTML well enough to develop a couple of sites using only vi and who has decided to learn CSS. Overview The back cover blurb claims that Core CSS 2nd Edition is a comprehensive guide that shows both beginning and expert web developers all they need to know to achieve great results with the latest style sheet properties. It also claims to be ... the most complete and up-to-date CSS reference available. This review will explore those two claims. What's To Like The first thing to like about this book is that it does cover almost everything that it's possible to write about Cascading Style Sheets. I have included the table of contents below so that you can get a feel for the breadth that this book aims at covering. The writing style is clear and explanatory with an underlying conversational tone, quite suited to this manner of book. It is also obvious from the text that Mr. Schengli-Roberts does understand his subject matter very well indeed.

The biggest thing to like about this book, for me, is appendix B, an alphabetical listing of the defined CSS properties and values. This list covers 92 pages and is a key part of the whole book. Importantly, it doesn't feel like filler and gives an impression that care has been taken in devising this very useful resource. Each entry in the appendix gives an example of correct usage of each property, which as a CSS neophyte I appreciated greatly.

What's To Consider This book carries a 2004 copyright, yet it feels old when you view the list of browser compatibilities for each property. While it does give compatibility information for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, it only covers Mozilla 1.0, it mentions Konqueror without any version details and completely omits Apple's Safari browser. This spotty coverage seems at odds with the rest of the book and really felt like a glaring omission to me. Summary This is a good book -- and if you're in the process of learning to use Cascading Style Sheets, you should certainly consider it for your collection. It is flawed by a poor selection of browsers for it's compatibility lists; while this may not be an issue for you, I found it quite irksome. This explains my review score and my description of this book as a flawed diamond.

Far more information than most people could ever want to know about Simon P. Chappell is available at his personal website. You can purchase Core CSS (2nd ed.) from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Matthew Morgan writes "Mozilla's strengths as an application platform often go unrecognized for lack of good documentation. Nigel McFarlane sets out to change that in Rapid Application Development with Mozilla. McFarlane describes his book as "a conceptual overview, reference, and tutorial" for building applications on the Mozilla platform. But does he have room for all three in one book?" Read on for Morgan's answer to that question. Rapid Application Development with Mozilla author Nigel McFarlane pages 770 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 7 reviewer Matthew Morgan ISBN 0131423436 summary A good overview and tutorial for building applications atop Mozilla, though not a comprehensive reference.

The Basics Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (hereafter RADM) centers on XUL, Mozilla's XML dialect for describing GUIs. Other Mozilla components, like XBL and RDF, are described mainly in terms of how they plug into XUL. Each chapter presents and explains a component, then shows it in action by using it in an example application (a web-page annotator) developed throughout the book. Chapter conclusions take the form of debugging hints; as McFarlane ruefully notes, most errors cause Mozilla to silently do nothing, making debugging a chore.

The first half of RADM covers basic XUL use -- the usual complement of widgets with CSS to style them and JavaScript to manipulate them. McFarlane does assume previous exposure to basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but extensive experience isn't required. At each step McFarlane does a good job explaining what's similar to HTML (e.g. most DOM stuff) and what isn't (e.g. the layout model). A few components have no real analog in the HTML model, like Mozilla's command dispatch system, so they're presented from the ground up.

The Back End

The second half of the book leans more toward the back end: using RDF for registries and template data; piping data into XUL with overlays, templates, and XBL; using and implementing XPCOM components; and deploying applications built on Mozilla.

McFarlane's RDF tutorial is one of the best I've seen. He starts off on the right foot by introducing things in terms of a directed graph, with lots of examples and diagrams. Only after eighteen pages of that does he introduce the RDF/XML syntax. His explanation of RDF/XML is unusually lucid, quite a feat considering how hairy RDF/XML gets. (Disclaimer: I've had past experience with RDF, so I wasn't reading this as a beginner -- in other words, YMMV.)

In the succeeding chapters, RDF is applied within the various Mozilla arenas, like XUL overlays and package installation, where it's used to store config information. The centerpiece of RDF in Mozilla, though, is in its use to create data-driven XUL files through XUL templates.

The chapter on templates runs to sixty-plus pages, and it's worth it. McFarlane covers things I haven't seen covered anywhere else. For instance, he describes the algorithm the RDF query engine uses to evaluate queries, so that you can better understand what kind of queries you can construct. This is crucial information because the query syntax allows a lot of queries that are logically reasonable, but won't actually work.

This points to a strength of RADM: McFarlane doesn't hesitate to criticize Mozilla where necessary. Throughout the book, he flags incomplete features, buggy implementations, and other gotchas, such as security restrictions surrounding RDF that make it all but useless for remote scenarios.

(Incidentally, McFarlane explicitly disclaims coverage of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, sticking to Mozilla 1.4, but in practice everything I've tried has worked fine in Firefox 0.8.)

Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

So, does RADM manage to accomplish its goals of being a conceptual overview, tutorial, and reference? I'd give it two out of three.

As a conceptual overview, RADM shines. McFarlane is at his best when comparing and contrasting closely related components, like overlays, templates, and XBL, all of which extend XUL but do it in different ways. I was left with a good picture of what can and can't be done in Mozilla.

As a tutorial, RADM is solidly useful. The example-application sections cover a surprisingly large amount of ground -- more than enough to get a developer new to Mozilla up and running. McFarlane chose a good subset to present as examples; still, all of his clear writing can't paper over the fact that Mozilla is really complicated, not just internally, but in the interface it presents to developers using it as a platform.

As a reference, RADM stumbles. The index is slim -- a mere eighteen pages after 752 pages of content -- which makes small chunks of information hard to find. This is mitigated by a detailed and well-organized table of contents. After a few weeks of use, I find myself turning to the contents first, and only trying the index if I have to.

Fundamentally, though, RADM isn't really a reference book, and definitely not a "quick reference." You'd be better off using a good site like XULPlanet for quick what-arguments-does-that-method-take checks, and reserving RADM for in-depth explanations.

Conclusion

RADM is published in Bruce Perens' Open Source Series at Prentice Hall under the Open Publication License. After a few months of letting the book sell on its own, they'll post the PDF of the entire book online. Is it worth buying in print? Given that it's more of a sit-down-and-read book than a quick-reference guide, I'd say so.

If you're considering Mozilla as a platform, I'd recommend RADM for its reasonable balance that shows Mozilla's strengths and weaknesses. If you're already sold on Mozilla and just want to wrap your head around it and start building an app on it, RADM is the book for you.

You can purchase Rapid Application Development with Mozilla from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page

unmadindu writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."

rjray writes with news that yesterday "the W3C gave their official stamp of approval-- Technical Recommendation status-- to VoiceXML 2.0. Trade publications covering this include internetnews.com. The move also recognizes the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and combines the two together under the heading of 'Speech Interface Framework.'" Here's the W3C press release.

rjray writes with news that yesterday "the W3C gave their official stamp of approval-- Technical Recommendation status-- to VoiceXML 2.0. Trade publications covering this include internetnews.com. The move also recognizes the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and combines the two together under the heading of 'Speech Interface Framework.'" Here's the W3C press release.

rjray writes with news that yesterday "the W3C gave their official stamp of approval-- Technical Recommendation status-- to VoiceXML 2.0. Trade publications covering this include internetnews.com. The move also recognizes the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and combines the two together under the heading of 'Speech Interface Framework.'" Here's the W3C press release.

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."

KjetilK writes "During the past couple of days, the World Wide Web Consortium, have advanced several core XML-specifications to Recommendations. You have the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 as well as XML 1.0 Third Edition. In addition, XML Infoset Second Edition is now a Recommendation and VoiceXML 2.0 is now Proposed Recommendation."

KjetilK writes "During the past couple of days, the World Wide Web Consortium, have advanced several core XML-specifications to Recommendations. You have the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 as well as XML 1.0 Third Edition. In addition, XML Infoset Second Edition is now a Recommendation and VoiceXML 2.0 is now Proposed Recommendation."