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choosing your battles

March 19th, 2001

it’s all about what you’re trying to solve. the inability of most current browsers to do SOAP or XML-RPC outta the box will be solved by the arrival of the next generation of browsers. any attempts to get it happening before that will result in two things:

  1. a temporary bridge to the future
  2. a permanent bridge to the past

i have to agree with the webstandards folks that we’ve gotta stop pandering to those who refuse to get with the program.

the upshot of this is that i’m not going to pursue hacky, kludged SOAP and XML-RPC colostomy bag add-ons. for now i’ll use my trusted sherpa guide remote scripting to keep the UI smooth, and do the real acrobatics on the server side where I can already use XML-based RPC in all its splendour

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you got chocolate in my peanut butter!

March 16th, 2001

i’m investigating the possibility of writing a SOAP or XML-RPC client in javascript, to use the JSRS transfer mechanism. complexities abound:

  1. javascript cross-frame scripting limitations would mean that i’d have to broker any transactions to foreign servers through the server

  2. the XML parsing would be a real beast to implement completely in javascript on the client side since i would want to get this to work across various browsers

  3. the asynchronous nature of JSRS would not fit well

a thought i have had re the first point leads me towards just having jsrs act as a broker to a SOAP or XML-RPC proxy running on the server.

the asynch problem remains, but that’s worth pursuing for now. yeah, that’s it. sure. i’m glad we had this chat.

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aboot brent ashley, eh

March 13th, 2001

first and foremost, i’m father to my children. but that’s not what i’m here on the net for.

netwise, i’m an independent consultant and programmer. i’m a voracious consumer of technical knowledge who believes that the value of information is realized in its sharing.

oh, yeah, the canadian thing too.

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soapy services

March 13th, 2001

i’ve been doing the remote scripting thing for some time now and have found it to be way useful. i wrote a cross-browser remote scripting library called JSRS that has been getting some press of late.

SOAP and XML-RPC are two birds of a similar feather to remote scripting, but of much greater promise. i’ve been resisting SOAP and XML-RPC until now because remote scripting has suited my needs and i don’t want to overcomplicate things HOWEVER with the remarkable coolness of charles cook’s latest blurb about XML-RPC, i’m sold.

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already running on empty

March 4th, 2001

this excercise in extroverted introspection is less fun than i thought. i find myself stretching to concoct off-the-cuff sounding profundities. yeeesh.

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musing on music and wine

March 2nd, 2001

i read a quote recently (forgot who it was, alas) along the lines that jazz is an adult sensibility – there are no jazz-playing child prodigies. i liken my evolution of musical taste from pop to jazz to my journey from sweet to dry white, then thin to full-bodied red wine. it’s all a refinement of the pallette, a maturation of one’s sensibilities.

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journeymen are we

March 2nd, 2001

whatever happened to the age-old practice of apprenticeship? investment in talent, mentoring, lifelong learning. corporate 21st century employee-widgets are just so many dixie cups to be filled up with courses and seminars, consumed in a series of project-oriented gulps, and discarded.

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Re: stumbling into the light

March 2nd, 2001

Experimenting with responses here.