A four movement symphony pattern

Portal yields bots yields Web Service API yields File System Abstraction.

Listen up all ye persistence-capable web apps:
Resistance is futile. You will become a file server..

Web CRUD marches on

I have previously opined the fact that it remains easier to fire up Access, Lotus Notes etc. to create an application with Create, Read/Report, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations on relational databases, than to try to do the same as a web app. This is one area where "the simple things should be simple" has not proven true to date.

Anything that involves cutting HTML templates, coding servlets etc. is just too low level for a whole class of "power user" database-oriented applications.

The whole two-way web thing which, for some reason, has caught fire with AJAX and co. appears to be changing that slowly but surely.

This Turbogears example is the sign of things to come. Design, deploy, manage and interact with a fully fledged web-hosted database application using nothing but coffee, a web cafe and some free time between flight connections? It is becoming increasingly possible.

Irish Government Budget 2006 - ODF Format + RSS Feed

The Budget for 2006 published by the Irish Government`s Department of Finance. ODF downloads available. RSS feed available.

An incapacitation of options

An incapacitation of options is a terrible thing.

Jython, Frank Wierzbicki

Frank Wierzbicki, who has taken over as prime Jython mover from Brian Zimmers has started a blog. Subscribed.

Onelook, wildcards and reverse lookup

My favourite dictionary and yranoitcid onelook is back and can do more useful stuff than I rememberit doing before such as wildcarding. Recommended.

Open XML formats for Word Processor Documents and Literate Programming

ODF - the future of literate programming?.

I think the possibilities here are very interesting. By and large, we write programs in text editors. That immediately creates problems in creating good documentation. Not easy to throw in the odd diagram. Not easy to segment the contents hierarchically and stick a TOC at the top. Not easy to footnote the code. Not easy to cross-ref one part of the code to another. Not easy to include the spreadsheet that holds the master decision tree etc. etc. etc.

So why not knock out your code in say, OpenOffice, use paragraph styles to indicate what parts of the text are really code. Then feed just the code bits through to your compiler or interpreter?

Why stop there? Why not make import statements in programming languages smart enough to recognise zipped XML Office notations when they see them?

Just a thought.