Traditional Grid Services have been built on the XML-RPC Model, and require complex tools and frameworks in order to be used at all. This tends to lead to highly structured efforts to force convergence on a single implementation, in order to share the pain -- er, minimize the total investment.There has to be a better... Continue Reading →

Yes, I accept Bruce's bet. I affirm, while he denies, that:By January 1st, 2010 more technical documents will be authored in XHTML + microformats than using any mix of DocBook or OpenDocument and RDF Loser pays for dinner at Chevy?s in San Francisco. Click [Read More] for my reasoning. In line with my microformats brethren,... Continue Reading →

I've just posted a presentation describing a new web-services architecture named "REX":REST-Enabled XHTML This is the technology formerly known as STRUM and DETH. Click [Read More] for the backstory and alternate names. After struggling through a plethora of names: ? STRUM: Script-Tunneling REST Using Microformats ? DETH: Dictionaries Encoding/Transmitting HTML ? XHTML-REST: vs. XML-RPC ?... Continue Reading →

Here's an attempt to show how DETH data-structures get mapped onto Python dictionaries.The idea is that as a client I could do something like:=====import dethdict=deth.getDict("http://somesite.com/users/")dict["firstname"]="Ernie"dict["lastname"]="Prabhakar"nextDict=deth.postDict(dict, "http://somesite.com/users/")=====And hopefully something just as simple on the server. It would be nice to have a cgi or something that would turn the url-encoded key-value pairs into a XOXO 'dl'... Continue Reading →

I've been noodling some more about how to clarify the concepts behind STRUM, and particularly how it relates to REST. I've stripped the idea down further to something I call DETH: like REST, but more so. 🙂 DETH = Dictionaries Encoding/Transmitting HTML. I've started mocking it up on the forms-brainstorming page:http://microformats.org/wiki/forms-brainstorming DETH is intended to... Continue Reading →

STRUM is still too complex. Can we make it simpler?The endgame is always DE/TH: Dictionaries Encoding/Transmitting HTMLorDHTML Encoding/Transmitting Hashtables The way to maximize your happiness is to die to your happinessfor something bigger than your happiness.Click [Read More] for the technical description. DETH is a way to reversibly encode dictionaries in HTML, such that they... Continue Reading →

Jason Fried from 37signals gave my favorite Web 2.0 talk about "Less" Notes by Ian Davis. My summary:Five ways to do less 1. Less money: no debt 2. Less people: only three 3. Less time: only do essentials 4. Less abstractions: build what works 5. Less software: fewer features, iterate

.STRUM was introduced at Thursday night's Microformats BOF at Web 2.0.Tags: strum, REST, microformats .STRUM is a way to easily do XHTML-RPC via REST URIsby providing a trivial mapping between scripting languages, XOXO lists, and XHTML forms/anchors.Benefits: ? No need to learn/understand network programming ? Trivial to adapt to any scripting language ? Generally only... Continue Reading →

I'm using this article to list the events I plan to attend at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. This should help me plan my attendance at various activities (and others try to find me :-). You can also see my Web2Con page. Wednesday: ? 8:30am - 9:45am From Community to Commerce: The Arrival of Podcasting... Continue Reading →