Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 1/21/2001
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 1/21/2001; 9:10:59 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 1/21/2001 Msg #: 22058 Prev/Next: 22057 / 22059
DaveNet: The U.S. Blues. "The patent hypers have no shortage of stories about lovely little guys with high ideals and strong principles. But a software guy who puts up gates that keep people out doesn't really understand software, imho. Software is about communication and sharing and working together. At least if you use computers, you'd better hope so."
Eric Kidd: XML-RPC Howto. "It includes sample clients and servers in Perl, Python, C, C++, Java and PHP. It shows you how to implement an XML-RPC server as a CGI, using either Perl or C." A tour de force.
I love how Eric works. With other people I'd worry that they're going to leave me out of the success of my creation. Eric gets to work, delivers a key implementation, and then turns to evangelism. He's total fresh blood. I moved on from XML-RPC a long time ago, working on OPML and RSS, and desktop websites, directories, bionic pages, content routing, Magic Folders (see below) and back to music (one more time). All these activities assume that XML-RPC exists, and of course it does. Eric correctly realized that what was needed was the option for upward scaling, and his C implementation gives us that. Frontier is great for bootstraps, but if we had millions of users, well, I'd rather use C. Eric's work with the generous help of others gives me, and every other XML-RPC developer, that path forward.
Dictionary.Com: Tour de force. "A feat requiring great virtuosity or strength, often deliberately undertaken for its difficulty."
Ohio.Com: "Menusaver Inc contends it holds a patent for crustless peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and intends to maintain its exclusive rights to the lunchtime staple."
Yesterday I did a feature for Radio called Magic Folders. A router for folders. Now if you plop a file into the images folder it goes into the images folder (via FTP) on My Blog. I think essays are going to work the same way. Just a little bit of glue to create a workgroup. They're magic because there's almost nothing there, like any good router it's just a glue-bit. "When you see one of these, do this."
Someone sent a pointer to OpenCola's "smart folders" thinking they were like our magic ones. Not so. Their folders are not magic in the same way that ours are. You could probably implement their kind of folder with our kind, but it would take some smarts elsewhere to make them smart. Ours are actually pretty dumb. ";->"
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