I am really impressed by Scala, though I have not used it on any real projects yet. Apart from reflection, it seems to be much stronger than Java in all the kinds of features that are good for XML document processing: co-routines, pattern matching and so on. The built-in XML tree that documents can be parsed in to does not contain back pointers, so up-going axes require extra coding; Scala is obviously more congenial for OmniMark or XSLT programmers than Java.

SAMBA’s Jeremy Allison has a great post Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard. What leaps out to me? First, that the method of requiring complete documentation outside a formalized QA process doesn’t work real well. The second thing is that even if there is documentation, some incompatibilities come down to capability mismatches.

I am really impressed by Scala, though I have not used it on any real projects yet. Apart from reflection, it seems to be much stronger than Java in all the kinds of features that are good for XML document processing: co-routines, pattern matching and so on. The built-in XML tree that documents can be parsed in to does not contain back pointers, so up-going axes require extra coding; Scala is obviously more congenial for OmniMark or XSLT programmers than Java.

Stuart Myles has a quick slide presentation Schematron and Other Useful Tools at the IPTC Autumn Meeting about how the Associated Press reduced manual checking & QA of incoming iAtom feeds using open source tools.

SAMBA’s Jeremy Allison has a great post Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard. What leaps out to me? First, that the method of requiring complete documentation outside a formalized QA process doesn’t work real well. The second thing is that even if there is documentation, some incompatibilities come down to capability mismatches.

From Bruce D’Arcus’ Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601’s problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some date values are ambiguous so you need to make a subset or add some attribute to say which kind of date you mean.

Stuart Myles has a quick slide presentation Schematron and Other Useful Tools at the IPTC Autumn Meeting about how the Associated Press reduced manual checking & QA of incoming iAtom feeds using open source tools.

Two months ago I alerted readers Europeans: only two weeks left to comment on ICT & standards whitepaper. I am not sure on which dots actually join up, but a Dutch website has what is claimed to be a leaked late draft in English of European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) Version 2.0. Here are some of the general recommendations related to standards and issues raised on this blog.

From Bruce D’Arcus’ Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601’s problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some date values are ambiguous so you need to make a subset or add some attribute to say which kind of date you mean.

Two months ago I alerted readers Europeans: only two weeks left to comment on ICT & standards whitepaper. I am not sure on which dots actually join up, but a Dutch website has what is claimed to be a leaked late draft in English of European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) Version 2.0. Here are some of the general recommendations related to standards and issues raised on this blog.