Digital Magpie

Ooh, ooh, look - shiny things!

Mac Annoyances

John Gruber takes issue with external editor support in apples new XCode application. I’m wondering what the Mac is like as a development platform? I love the hardware, and there are lots of neat things about the Mac, but is it a viable platform to switch to?

Update: Yes, it is. I switched a few months after this was written and haven’t looked back.

JSR-173 Reference Implementation

I’ve been looking at the new streaming API for XML (JSR-173), I’ve been generally impressed but have found a bug in the reference implementation, here’s the details, using this test program:

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import java.io.*;
import javax.xml.stream.*;
public class StaxWriterTest {
    static String nsURI = "http://ianp.org/nsURI";
    static String nsPrefix = "a";
    static int depth = 0; // Used to pretty print the output.
    static XMLStreamWriter w;
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            w.writeStartDocument();
            indent(1);
            w.writeStartElement(nsURI, "root");
            w.writeNamespace(nsPrefix, nsURI);
            indent(0);
            w.writeEmptyElement(nsURI, "levelOne");
            w.writeAttribute(nsURI, "foo", "foo");
            indent(0);
            w.writeStartElement(nsURI, "levelOne");
            w.writeEndElement();
            indent(1);
            w.writeStartElement(nsURI, "levelOne");
            indent(1);
            w.writeEmptyElement(nsURI, "levelTwo");
            w.writeAttribute(nsURI, "foo", "foo");
            indent(-2);
            w.writeEndElement();
            indent(0);
            w.writeStartElement(nsURI, "levelOne");
            w.writeEndElement();
            indent(-1);
            w.writeEndElement();
            w.flush();
            w.close();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            System.exit(1);
        }
    }
    static void indent(int d) {
        try {
            if (d < 0) { depth += d; }
            for (int i = 0; i < depth; ++i)
            w.writeCharacters("  ");
            if (d > 0) { depth += d; }
        } catch (XMLStreamException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }
}

This is using version 7 of the reference implementation, by the way. The program should produce this output:

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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<a:root xmlns:a="http://ianp.org/nsURI">
    <a:levelOne a:foo="foo"/>
    <a:levelOne/></a:levelOne>
    <a:levelOne>
        <a:levelTwo a:foo="foo"/>
    </a:levelOne>
    <a:levelOne/></a:levelOne>
</a:root>

But actually produces this:

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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<a:root xmlns:a="http://ianp.org/nsURI">
    <a:levelOne a:foo="foo"/>
    <a:levelOne/></a:levelOne>
    <a:levelOne/>
        <a:levelTwo a:foo="foo"/>
    </a:levelOne>
    <a:levelOne/></a:levelOne>
</a:root>

Line 5 is generated as an empty element instead of a start element. I’ve pointed this out the to JCP committee, we’ll see if they repsond.

Fedora

By coincidence I just finished reading up on the Fedora Project before I read this post from Diego. As I see it Redhat are going to push the Fedora project as their replacement for the Professional edition (i.e. Red Hat 9). This probably makes sense since they can free up a lot of resources whilst hopefullty maintaining market visibility. If they can increase the speed of the release cycle for this it may even help them gain some more converts (and it sure does look pretty!).

Appropriate Technology

This says it all:

Web services technology also gets more than its fair share of misuse. Web services are great, if that’s really what you need. The problem arises when people use web services ‘just because’, or apply web services inappropriately, like using SOAP as an internal messaging bus.

We get this all the time in RFC’s and RFP’s at work, the obligatory how do you support web services question. For internal integration projects. Urghh… .