Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West [RoadTrip]

Chris Sells is organizing a conference called Applied XML DevCon 2003 in Portland, Oregon. Since this is only a few hours drive from the Belly of the Beast I've decided to organize a road trip and invite as many of WebData XML team's brighest XML stars (basically everybody) to the conference. I need to get management approval since I don't want to have half the team lose a day but I've already pinged Joshua, Chris Lovett, Erik (Tip of the Day from Erik's homepage, "If ' XSD is the one and only type system handed to us by God', then I am a broomstick"), Derek (Hmmmm, didn't realize he'd been on the W3C SGML working group), and Mark who've expressed interest in going as long as the conference doesn't conflict with anything important. Since this is about two months away nothing is definite but I'd love to get at least 10 folks from the team to go check the conference out.

I've decided that it probably makes sense for me to give a talk at the conference so here are two potential abstracts. I haven't sent either one to Chris and will wait for my poll results + feedback before deciding if I'll send him an abstract and if so which one.

1. Processing RSS: Problems and Solutions Encountered Building A Desktop News Aggregator

   This article will be about various issues with processing RSS feeds that I've encountered while working on RSS Bandit. Issues will range from handling relative links in RSS feeds and dealing with encoded XML in description elements to designing an extensible XML-oriented plugin architecture and using the benefits of using XSLT to translate between blogroll formats.

   
   
   
2. Defining a Common Subset of W3C XML Schema That Satisfies Object, Relational and XML Data Models

   The great data triangle has three vertices; XML, Relational and objects. Application developers typically interact with data that has one or more of the vertices as a primary data source. Mapping between each of the vertices usually requires some sort of mapping layer in the case of XML <-> objects it is the various XML data binding technologies from Java's JAXB and BEA's XMLBeans to .NET XML Serialization, for XML <-> relational you have technologies like SQLXML and the .NET framework's DataSet, while for relational <-> objects you have various object relational mapping technologies of which Object Spaces and JDO & Entity Beans are examples (Fabrice has a list of persistence and data related code generators for the .NET framework).

   The talk would be about two edges of the data triangle relational <-> XML and objects <-> XML. I'll focus on the various impedence mismatches in trying to translate XML structures described using W3C XML Schema to relational schemas and object oriented data models. I'll conclude by describing the subset of W3C XML Schema that should work for each edge of the triangle in the theoretical sense and which actually do work across various Microsoft products.

PS: Someone should teach Chris about the benefits of permalinks. Can anyone figure out how to find the original link to last year's XML Web Services DevCon?

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MSDN Kudos

There was a recent MSDN redesign which I and a few others dislike. What I thought was totally cool is that Sara Williams, the Product Unit Manager (head honcho) of MSDN, has her email address on there for people to address their complaints and she responds to email promptly as I can attest. Especially cool is the fact that she actually takes time to respond to blog commentary about MSDN as she did on both Simon Fell's blog and Brad Wilson's blog.

I think that's really fucking cool.

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We Live To Die

Four Die As Gunmen Shoot At Obasanjo's Daughter

President Olusegun Obasanjo's daughter, Iyabo, Sunday evening escaped gun attacks as men suspected to be armed robbers fired at her car, killing four of the people inside the vehicle, a Peugeot 607 with presidency number plate. Presidency officials, however, do not rule out assassins.

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.