XForms Everywhere

Cover Pages, a publication of OASIS, carries an article about our submission of the XML Pipeline Language (XPL) to the W3C. The article provides a good overview of the goals and motivations, the processing model, the language features, and related works.

Consider this:

• Blogger can host your blog.
• Blogrolling lets you have an online blog roll, which in short is a list of links to blogs you are watching.
• XQuery The Web lets you run XQuery on a web page.

If your blog is on Blogger, and your blog roll is on Blogrolling, how can you show your blog roll in your blog? Blogrolling provides an RSS feed for your blog roll, but you cannot write server-side code on Blogger that would pull out data from that RSS feed and generate HTML. However, on Blogger you can include an external script with: <script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://…”>.

That script can be dynamically generated to produce HTML based on the Blogrolling RSS feed. With XQuery The Web, you can do this in a couple of clicks:

1. Go to XQuery The Web
2. In the URL field enter the RSS link provided by Blogrolling.
3. In the XQuery field, enter this query:

   <ul>
     {for $i in /rss/channel/item return
       <li><a href=\"{$i/link}\">{string($i/title)}</a></li>
     }
   </ul>
   

4. Select the JavaScript radio button, and run the query.
5. Copy the generated <script> tag and include it in your blog template where you want your blog roll to appear.

For instance, based on the RSS feed provided by Blogrolling, XQuery The Web generates JavaScript which is included in my personal blog.

Yes, this blog has been down for most of last week. The reason: our server had been hacked and we were closing the breaches that have been used by the hackers. Among those, were security bugs in both WordPress and AWStat. Those two applications are written with the two most popular scripting languages: PHP and Perl. And this might not be a coincidence. It is certainly possible to write perfectly secure applications with both languages, but they inherently do not encourage security. For instance:

• By default, the value of non-initialized global variable can be set by the user in PHP.
• User data needs to be explicitly escaped before it is sent to a database, as user data is in general inserted in SQL statement using string concatenations.

Those two problems, as well as many others do not occur with compiled languages, like Java. On the other side, PHP and Perl provide a faster development experience than Java (modify the source, reload the page, and see the result), as no code compilation is required. One is tempted to say that this is one of those cases where you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Not true: you can have both the robustness of the Java platform and the fast development cycle of PHP and Perl with XML technologies: XForms to capture data from the end-user and languages like XPL, XSLT, and XQuery.

The new Spotlight search in Mac OS X Tiger shows what a search engine should not have: a submit button. Why do applications force us to click on a button, instead of showing us what we are looking for as we type?

The widespread deployment of browsers supporting the XMLHttpRequest object coupled with an increase in processing power on the server side enable us to create web applications that feel more like Spotlight. It is in fact my belief that there will be a move towards this type of interaction in the coming years, starting with getting rid the submit button.

Give a try to Translate This, a new addition to the PresentationServer examples. It provides an alternative interface with no submit button to the Google Language Tools.

Updated (2005-04-28): Cédric Savarese asked people in his blog for suggestions of applications that would need an Ajax makeover. What we did with Translate This is an example. You have a suggestion? Post it in Cédric’s blog.

One benefit of using the integrated browser in Studio is that the Logging Events view can be cleared every time you click on a link or reload a page, so it only displays data for the last page you loaded. If you don’t want the browser to be always visible and want to show it with a simple key stroke, the solution is to make the Web Browser view a Fast View (right click on view title then select “Fast View” in the menu), and to assign a key to that view (Preferences, Keys, category: Views, name: Web Browser).

Studio: Web Browser Fast View Visible

Studio: Web Browser Hidden