John Evdemon

HiT Software provides a line of standards-based XML and SQL middleware for application development and systems integration. HiT's Allora product line provides bidirectional XML access to databases and supports standard DOM/SAX parsers and, optionally, is accessible via SOAP interfaces (JMS support is also available). jAllora is the Java-based version of HiT's Allora middleware product and provides an easy-to-use and -understand approach to serializing relational data into an XML format (a version of Allora, winAllora, is also available for the Windows platform). Pros Easy to install and use; APIs are well documented. Conforms to existing standards (supports DTD, XSD, SAX, DOM). Integrates into popular Java IDEs (Sun's Forte and Borland's JBuilder). The graphical mapper product made generating XML representations of relational data relatively simple. Excellent suppor... (more)

Eliminating Redundancy in XML Using ID/IDREF

XML can be thought of as the "universal serialization of data." It provides a flexible, open approach for modeling data and sharing messages among business partners (or systems) in a consistent manner. XML provides the ideal solution to messaging in a B2B e-commerce infrastructure since it enables a loosely coupled design that can significantly lower a partner's barrier to entry. While most users of XML utilize its hierarchical nature to define data, this article discusses possible approaches for eliminating redundant data within XML messages by employing the features of ID and ID... (more)

John Evdemon's Top Ten Predictions for 2008

Noted SF author William Gibson has been quoted as saying "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet." Here are my Top Ten Predictions for 2008: #1: REST interest grows as capability gaps are filled: REST will continue to gain popularity for broadly consumable, Internet Scale services. Lightweight frameworks will add value to REST by adding support for structured data and eventing, making difficult tasks like pub/sub, discovery and state alignment easier to implement. #2: Devices, not laptops: A device inflection point emerges for portability, power, storage and Int... (more)

Rube Goldberg Would Have Loved XML Schema

Rube Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who illustrated complex ways to achieve easy results, saw his cartoons as "symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results." He believed there were two ways to do things: simple and hard, and that a surprising number of people preferred the latter. At this writing the XML-Dev mailing list is debating the role of XML for IETF protocols (more specifically, the requirement to use XML Schema when defining XML-based IETF protocols). (XML-Dev is a high-traffic mailing list targeting XML developers. Re... (more)

REST & Pneumatic Tube Systems

It's often said that history repeats itself - and by studying history we gain better insight into our current (and future) society. In the late 1800s the telegraph was immensely popular, but telegraphs only connected telegraph offices. Messages still had to be transcribed into a paper format and delivered to the appropriate person. Delivering them was a problem due to transportation costs, personnel costs, and time lost between transcription and delivery. Pneumatic tube systems were developed to transport documents within a building or across an entire city (London had a tube sy... (more)