Working with Atom

Well today my big feat was grabbing the Atom feed that this page generates and writing it to my personal page on the corporate website. I've created redundancy! The process was actually incredibly simple - I just grabbed a pre-existing ASP.Net application for parsing Atom from SourceForge and just set the program to grab the feed that Blogger sends out. The actual code is nothing, which is really sweet.

Now, if I can get the company hosting my site to allow me to change the permissions on my folders so that I can have the rounded corners that are supposed to be there...

The struggle for faster XML

Interesting - I just finished reading a CNet article on trying to make XML faster. Apparently there are a number of projects trying to make XML formatted in binary, so as to compress the information and make it faster to transmit. Of course the fear is that the differing projects and the differing goals - like mobile services vs. commerce transactions - would lead to diverging strains of XML. Then there is the counter argument - make networks transmit faster...

My thoughts: I think that I prefer the creation of compressed streams. The reason I feel is that we should as developers always be trying to be as efficient as possible with limited resources. This is similar to how software companies in the past decade have relied on computer hardware to become faster with greater amounts of memory while being lazy with how solutions are implemented. As for creating divergent streams of XML, that may happen, but as long as they are derived from a base and can be converted to each other I don't think that is a problem. However, standards will need to be enforced, either by the W3 Org or another organization (but preferably out of a corporation's or a group of corporations' hands...)

Another development tool to learn

My colleagues here are beginning to play around with Macromedia's Flex platform - it is sweet! Really nice, smooth controls with an elegant looking GUI. Loaded with lots neat tricks that would require a lot of coding in .Net framework and Javascript requires very little coding in the Java based environment. Another nice thing is a compact, fully explainable API (anybody who has developed with .Net knows what I'm talking about - how many thousands of pages are on MSDN?) I think that when I get some free time I'm going to download the demo version and start playing with it - of course to be able to afford a full version of it will be a ways in the distance because of the costs.

But in the meantime, back to Java and re-learning XML and getting used to the Flex environment... It will be fun get some knowledge and experience on a tool before it becomes too common - might even gain me an advantage in the marketplace to get some contracts. Of course, Macromedia's current charge for hosting Flex sites are going to keep all but the biggest companies away for a while, but until then, a small window of advantage.

Moving forward on the company

Well, it is back to marketing the company I co-own. So I've started to develop the corporate website for Iconic Solutions that we've been putting off for so long. While pure web design is not my forté, it is nice to be something that is purely for myself without having to worry about other considerations (other that respecting my business partner's sense of esthetics). Got to do a lot of other things to get a contract, but I figure that I had better get the marketing infrastructure in place first.

Well back to it...