Vanity Foul
Dedicated to the wanderings of an egotistical mind.


20030902
Tuesday September 02, 2003

Atom 4 U, Atom 4 Me, Atom4J Released

I've joined the OSJava.org group (thanks guys) and released the first version of Atom4J. The "spec" is nowhere near complete, so expect a great deal of flux in Atom4j as well. As a part of my efforts, Atom4J includes an abstract Servlet upon which specific implementations can be built upon (thus enforcing the API). I should have a version for Roller checked in tonight.
( Sep 02 2003, 04:21:05 PM ) Atom Permalink [Trackback]

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20030830
Saturday August 30, 2003

Atom notes

I'm nearly done with Atom4J, just doing some final cleanup and reviewing the existing documentation to make sure I'm in compliance with the latest 'spec'. A couple things I've noticed:

1) You must carefully read all the sources of information. The main wiki[1] contains some information (but this tends to be a moving target), Joe Gregorio has a "Busy Developers Guide"[2] and a full API spec[3], there is a new wiki for the API[4], and there is the Feed spec(s) located at Mark's place[5].

2) I've had to "extend" the API a bit. The Introspection results don't specify how to retrieve the FindTemplates results - rather the edit-template element appears to specify the URI for editing an individual template. In Atom4J the edit-template URI now points to the FindTemplates service, where each template's URI is presented for editing. I've also adding "template" to the DELETE verb to allow for deleting templates. Still missing is a facility for creating templates (the POST verb).

3) Finally, it's hard to find the right place to bring up issues or point out inconsistencies. A wiki can be a wild-and-woolly place, and for a relative newcomer like myself (long-time lurker) it is intimidating. And so I've placed my thoughts here, in hopes they will filter into the main discussion in true Weblog style.

Here are the URLs mentioned above
[1] Atom wiki
[2] Busy developers guide to the AtomAPI
[3] The AtomAPI RFC
[4] condensed RFC
[5] Atom 0.2 Snapshot

( Aug 30 2003, 08:18:51 AM ) Atom Permalink [Trackback]



20030829
Friday August 29, 2003

Re: Atom and Digester

In between trips to the hospital, and sleeping, I had a little time to work on resolving my issue with Digester parsing Atom XML. As suggested in my comments and in the Digester-user list, I implemented a custom Rule and Handler. It took quite a bit of trial-and-error, but I got it working. Look for real results soon.
( Aug 29 2003, 12:10:48 PM ) Atom Permalink Comments [1] [Trackback]



20030826
Tuesday August 26, 2003

It's a boy

Baby Boy Lavandowska was born at 7:29 PM Central Time. He weighed 7 lbs, and is 21 inches long. After nearly 12 hours of contractions, it only took 20 minutes of pushing for him to make his appearance (he beat both his doctor and the in-house doctor). His nurse had only just come on duty, and she did a great job!

Mother and Son are doing well, and no, we haven't settled on a name yet. ( Aug 26 2003, 10:06:16 PM ) Personal Permalink Comments [11] [Trackback]



20030825
Monday August 25, 2003

Atom and XOM

Digester wasn't cutting it (haven't received that custom Rule yet), so I thought I'd try XOM. Well, XOM thinks the example Entry isn't WellFormed:
<content type="application/xhtml+xml" xml:lang="en-us">
<p xmlns="...">Hello, <em>weblog</em> world! 2 < 4!</p>
</content>

But if I put just "Hello World" in the <content> tag it's happy. Update: Tassos points out "2 < 4" is the culprit. Somehow I overlooked that. Thanks Tassos!

I don't know what isn't well-formed about that, but since <content> could contain "nasty" non-X HTML, wellformedness shouldn't be a requirement (damn users, can never count on them to do the right thing!). My search for another solution will continue tonight (Jason, wanna send me that package your mentioned in my comments?).

Good night, and thanks for your support.
( Aug 25 2003, 02:25:28 PM ) Atom Permalink Comments [4] [Trackback]



20030824
Sunday August 24, 2003

Atom and Digester

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm lazy. So I'm using Digester to parse the AtomAPI XML - but its falling down in one regard: <content>can contain <html></content>. And Digester sees this as just more XML, so the contents on the content tag only get assigned if there is no html.

Some general websearching, and searching on the Digester-user list, revealed one other person with a similar concern earlier this year. I've sent him an email, asking if he can supply more information on his solution. If not, or if that doesn't solve the issue, I'm afraid I'll have to resort to "hand-parsing" the AtomAPI. I'm lazy, I don't wanna do that.

But again, it may become necessary as the AtomAPI allows for adding arbitrary vendor-specific tags - <mt:fooBar> for example - and my Digester rules don't cover that at the moment. I do plan on re-expressing the rules via Digester's rules.xml capability though; that may allow for the flexibility necessary....
( Aug 24 2003, 01:30:02 PM ) Atom Permalink Comments [3] [Trackback]



20030823
Saturday August 23, 2003

And then on the Roller site... Since I've begun contributing to Roller I've received a couple attributions. It's always nice to be recognized, but Dave is grand enough to mention each of my contributions.
( Aug 23 2003, 08:12:29 PM ) Technology Permalink [Trackback]



20030822
Friday August 22, 2003

Atom4J

In a definite "me too" bid, I've begun work on making Roller support nEcho/Pie/Atom.

Step one was to allow Roller to emit an Atom feed. Check! When I get to upgrading Vanity Foul tonight you'll be able to get the feed. The content type is application/x.atom-xml so your browser probably won't show it (I had to select a text editor for it).

Next I've begun work on supporting the AtomAPI. That's a lot of XML to process, and I'm lazy. So I've started "Atom4J", an Atom support library for Java (duh!). When it's somewhere approaching usable I'll probably start a SourceForge project (or java.net?).

Currently there are inconsistencies as the "spec" fluxuates almost daily; the current feed spec and the AtomAPI Entry share a passing familiarity but that's about it.

Update: I think I confused the AtomAPI with the Atom feed, and perhaps the content type of the feed should just be text/xml? I cannot find a true defination anywhere, but Roller now conforms to Maximal Atom.
( Aug 22 2003, 06:55:05 PM ) Atom Permalink Comments [1] [Trackback]

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