edoneel daily - daily stuff on web services
I've moved to
sdf, a very cool public
access unix system. The new url is
http://edoneel.chaosnet.org
From now on this blog will focus on web services. I'll try to
document my experience with getting web services to run in
Squeak with a view to making
it understandable to anyone, regardless of the computer language
used
Reference information will appear on the
WebServices link in the upper
left corner but the essays will first appear below.
27 June 2003
Web Services
SOAP Over Jabber -
JEP-0072.
This will be my weekend reading since I am quite interested in
Jabber and SOAP. Why? I've been doing this internet thing since
long before it was called the internet. I find the media
viewpoint that we'll all use the internet for web browsing, and,
web browsing is much like watching TV with clicks, that asymetric
line speeds (think ADSL or Cable Modems) are fine. Also we never
will want to do anything other than watch videos etc.
I find this depressing and limiting.
Now, that said, without going to IPv6 we won't all have static
IP addresses, so, we have to deal with the real life case of
people having different IP addresses from 1 hour to the next.
Combine that with more and more of our computers will become
mobile (whether phones, PDAs, laptops, or what ever) and then
the idea of jabber and presence becomes very powerful.
How would that work? A normal web service would want to talk
to a specific web site, say, http://edoneel.chaosnet.org. This
name maps to an IP address, which is attached to a computer
somewhere in Texas. This computer is up almost all of the
time.
OTOH, my laptop moves around. At work it has a fixed address,
but no DNS record for assorted reasons. At home it
sits behind my ISDN router which also does NAT. This means that
you can't directly connect to it. Still, I'd like to run a SOAP
service in squeak on my laptop. Sounds hard. Not though if you
throw in Jabber. With jabber I would have a specific jabber id,
(I'm a big vague here since I'm still fuzzy on some of the
concepts) which you would be able to monitor to see if my laptop
was available, and, if so, then you would be able to make SOAP
requests to it.
Along these lines we have Bob Frankston with - We Have
Connectivity!
Thanks to Michael Rueger, we have Jabber in Squeak as well.
Get them from
here.
Apparently you have to load them in the following order:
- Yaxo removal
- Yaxo 2.0
- Network-IM
- Network-IM Jabber
- Network-IM Jabber UI
One might want to be a bit careful filing this into the image
we produced yesterday since Yaxo might conflict with the version
needed by SoapOpera. I'll get to this soon.
One final note on the image from yesterday. It seems that
Commanche want's to startup when you start the image. Just
close the debugger box for now. I'll find a fix in the next few
days.
Babble
off of David N. Smith's pages is another interesting view of
chat. Chat is not just people trolling for mates, but, people
communicating.
26 June 2003
Web Services
To get started we need just a bit of background. One of the
more important bits of Web Services that you must understand
before you go too much further is that of
SOAP
SOAP is a protocol specification, say just like the http
protocol one uses to browse the web, which let's you send some
information to a remote system and get some sort of answer
back. Let's say there is a weather SOAP server. You could ask
for the weather at KORD, O'Hare airport near Chicago USA, and it
would return to you the temp, time, cloud cover, etc.
But, you say, why don't I just go to the
Weather Channel and ask the
same thing? You can. But what if you wanted to to have some
page which aggregated a bunch of informatation together for you,
say, the weather at a bunch of places, the current best sellers
at Amazon, and a couple top google search terms, all on the same
page. There is not likely to be such a page at the moment.
With web services you can construct one. In addition you can
manipulate the data in a more convient form. Say instead of the
current temp, you wanted a graph of the last 24 hrs worth of
temps? Web services let you return answers in a form that the
computer can understand, rather than just in a browser for you,
the human to understand
Dave Weiner, who writes at
Scripting.com, is one of
the designers of SOAP and he is always worth reading for more
background on web services.
Over the next few days I'll also expand on what web services are
as well
Let's do some setup. We'll be working in Squeak, so, go to the
download
page and get the 3.6 alpha version. Why 3.6 alpha? We like
bleeding edge software, that's why!.
If you're not squeak familiar download one of the 3.5 bundles
from the downloading page and use those.
Now go and get
Comanche.
Comanche is a http server. Download the .sar file, click on the
squeak desktop and choose Open... from the World Menu. Then
choose "file list". Once there choose the Comanche .sar file
you just downloaded and click on install.
Now go and get
SoapOpera.
Unzip the file. Once again open up a file list from the
world/open menu and click on installSoapOpera0.5 directory.
Then click on install-all.st. In this file I set the line
operaInstall := true.
to
operaInstall := false.
to stop an error. This might be because I'm using 3.6, and/or
some other outdated version.
We have a SOAP server installed. So, you can sit back and
wonder, "what is it that I have done?"
For that we need to wait until tomorrow
25 June 2003
Web Services
- CapeClear does web
services software
- Web Services Inspection Language
1.0
Other Stuff
- Agile Methodologies for
Software Production
- Agile
Group at the
Università di Cagliari
- A whole bunch of RSS feeds for
Amazon
- Kinetic
Visualization
- Motion provides strong visual cues for the perception of
shape and depth, as demonstrated by cognitive scientists and
visual artists.
- Keeping your institution
safe
- LockSS - Lots of
Copies Keep Stuff Safe - Permanent Publishing on the Web
- Deciding when to forget in the
Elephant
file system
- Prospering with
precaution
24 June 2003
-
NewsMonster - blogs with a brain.
- The source of above is
at peerfear
but I can't get a good DNS lookup right now for
www.peerfear.org
- Structure and Intrepretation of Computer Programs - the
lecture, is
online
- Virtual African
University
- Commentary: Business Software Needs a
Revolution
- Pond
- the OceanStore prototype
- ARC:
A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache (2003)
- Pruning
filesets
- BBC RSS
feeds
23 June 2003
- Notes from
Tim O'Reilly's talk at Reboot 2003:
reboot.dk - an
Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow
- For the wimps in the crowd, in
English.
What, you don't read Danish?
- Marc Canter's
talk at
Reboot 2003 - "I'm going to talk about Longhorn and how we can
compete with MSFT." Impressionistic notes by Cory
Doctorow
- Jason Fried's
talk at
Reboot 2003 - Impressionistic notes by Cory Doctorow
- Dan Gillmor's
talk
at Reboot 2003 - Impressionistic notes by Cory Doctorow
- A Honey Pot for email
Harversters
- WCS - Jabber
Web Client Servies
20 June 2003
- SOAP for
CICS
- Allen claims success in work on computers that can
reason
- ProjectHalo
- The Halo final
Reports
- RSS promise and
Peril from Tim Bray
- For my future reference, though I'll never find it again,
rss 2.0 is
here
- Also some feeds (including the NYTimes!) are
here
- The Evolution of
Lisp
- Airline
Schedules
19 June 2003
- A buch'o xerox interlisp
stuff
- Along those lines, a fused Interlisp-D/Common Lisp system
named Medley is sold by
Venue
- ICFP 2003 is
soon
18 June 2003
17 June 2003
- Squeak Enterprise
Aubergines
- The Squeak Enterprise Aubergines project aims to create a
Squeak-based environment for the development and deployment of
sophisticated server-side applications.
13 June 2003
- The Active Object System Design and Multiprocessor
Implementation
- WorldBoard
- is a proposed planetary augmented reality system that
facilitates innovative ways of associating information with
places.
- In the same vein,
StarHill
- Computing
PageRank
on your PC?
12 June 2003
- Home WiFi with multiple
airports
- The Apple article describing the
Process
- You know, this is just a touch on the obsessive side - Build a
737-700 simulator in your
garage
- On-Line 68k programming
Guide
- What is WASTE? And what is it not? Tech Review has some
ideas
- Who is in the loop? Email visualization -
eAchivarius
- The real site is
Here
- Writing Faster Managed Code: Know What Things
Cost
- Tim Bray's comments on the
above
- Tim also thinks one should not ship slow
code
- The Liquid State Machine
Framework
11 June 2003
10 June 2003
9 June 2003
- Vis2003
- EPFL is sponsering
Bio-ADIT
2004 at the end of January, next year
- Supernova
2003 is in DC
while I'll be there. Hmm...
06 June 2003
- HotOS IX was in Lihue Hawaii last month and here are some
interesting papers. One might have to be a Usenix member to
read them.
-
Crash Only Software
- FAB:
Enterprise Storage Systems on a Shoestring
- The
Phoenix
Recovery System: Rebuilding from the Ashes of an Internet
Catastrophe
- POST:
A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging
System
- Palimpsest:
Soft-Capacity Storage for Planetary-Scale Services
- Virtual Appliances in the Collective: A Road to
Hassle-Free
Computing
- Why Can't I Find My Files? New Methods for Automating
Attribute
Assignment
- Towards a
Semantic-Aware File Store
- Using the market to find good
Investors
- Buddha, a delcarative
Debugger
- Haystack presents a piece of user interface on the left pane
to collect the required input. This piece of UI is called a
UI continuation, because it captures all the remaining
work of the operation to be done once the input has been
collected. UI continuations can be manipulated like any other
first-class object: they can even be bookmarked and saved for
later use. In other words, Jane can start an operation and
save its context so that she can complete it at a later
time. In contrast, conventional software mark their UI
contexts (and hence their unfinished tasks) by the presence or
absence of UI elements such as dialog boxes, which cannot be
easily packaged as first-class objects and saved for later
restoration.
d
05 June 2003
- Today is information visualation day!
- Tim Bray's company,
Antarctica
does some cool work
- An Atlas of
Cyberspace
- The
HCIL (Human Computer Interaction Lab) at University
of Maryland. Overview first, zoom and filter, then
details-on-demand.
- One must, of course, mention
Edward
Tuft
04 June 2003
- BusinessWeek article on
MySQL
- New Lispish weblog -
Katz's
Web
- CIA
is a bot that will take email from your CVS/Subversion
repositories' commit scripts, and output it to the #commits
channel on freenode, and optionally to your project's IRC
channel.
03 June 2003
- Telegraph a
research project in UC Berkeley's Computer Science
Division. We're studying technologies for adaptive dataflow,
which lend themselves to a number of new applications,
including an engine for web facts and figures and an
infrastructure for querying streaming data from sensors, logs,
and peer-to-peer systems.
- PostGIS
/PostgreSQL adds support for geographic objects to the
PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS
"spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be
used as a backend spatial database for geographic information
systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial
extension.
- Some RSS links
- ENT
Easy News Topics Module for RSS 2.0.
- k-collector
is an experimental RSS/ENT aggregator.
- Avida
moved.
- Richard
Lenski
uses Avida to work on experimental evolution
- The
Penn-Lehman Automated Trading Project
- Professor
Michael Kearns, one of the creators of the Penn-Lehman
Trading Project
- Related to above, the Island Book
Viewer
02 June 2003
- Smalltalk 80 just past its 20th
birthday
- 12 step program for Regime
Change
- (Secure) SHell FileSystem Linux kernel module
(shfs/sshfs)
- Haystack - the
universal information client
Bruce O'Neel
Last modified: Fri Jun 27 16:53:16 MEST 2003