April

The Google API Is a Two-Way Street

Jon Udell

Google's new SOAP API seemed to follow a boom-and-bust trajectory. Everyone was excited about it until it arrived. Then doubts arose. "Bah!" scoffed Edd Dumbill in an O'Reilly Network column, "what a waste of space for something that can be done in one line of shell script." Edd's point—that an HTML-screen-scraping alternative to the Google SOAP API is easy to hack together—is quite correct. But the conclusion—that Google's SOAP API is silly—is, I think, very wrong.

Zope Lessons Learned

Jon Udell

For over a year now, I've been tinkering on and off with a small groupware application based on Zope. It's used by the editorial team of a monthly magazine to centralize the many versions of files that precede the final versions sent to production, and to manage a shared calendar. I sometimes think of turning this app into a Zope plug-in (aka Product) that could be used by similar teams.

XSLT Explorations

Jon Udell

When I started developing for the Web, I was astonished to see how easily I could conjure applications seemingly out of thin air, by transforming patterns of text into other patterns of text. I'm still amazed by this phenomenon, though perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising. Life itself springs from a textual data structure (DNA), which transformative processes turn into other textual data structures (proteins). A programming language designed expressly to transform structured text is therefore, by definition, a really powerful tool. So despite my reservations about Extensible Stylesheet Transformations (XSLT), which to my mind awkwardly straddles the worlds of procedural and declarative programming, I find myself using it more and more often for things I used to do in parser-equipped scripting languages such as Perl or Python.