[unrev-II] Meeting Summary: 4 May 2000

From: Eric Armstrong (eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com)
Date: Thu May 04 2000 - 21:39:42 PDT

  • Next message: Paul Fernhout: "[unrev-II] TSOX v0.01 (was: Hierarchical version tool)"

    Major News
    ----------
    Lee Iverson put forward the results of some hard
    work and deep thinking he's been doing. If we are
    going to base this thing on XML, he said, then we
    get a lot of useful mechanisms for manipulating
    Document Object Model (DOM) trees (basically, the
    tree-structured form of a document).

    From there, he argued, it seems that what we really
    need is something along the lines of a *Distributed*
    DOM, or DDOM. Casting the problem in those terms
    immediately implies the need for node versioning,
    attribution tracking, and most of the other requirements
    previously identified for the system (while at the
    same time providing the mechanisms that can be used
    to fulfill those requirements).

    [[At about this point, you could hear the sound of jaws
    dropping. Casting the problem as "We need a DDOM"
    was such a brilliantly concise focus on the fundamental
    issues that it almost appears obvious in retrospect.
    But I suspect that the solution to that statement of the
    problem will be applicable in a wide variety of problem
    domains.]]

    During the discussion of the DDOM concept, Eugene pointed
    out that identifying the fundamental XML structure was
    the core issue. Given that, we can translate or transcode
    other data formats to it. [[The difference is one of
    persistence. If data starts out in form X, and I translate
    it to form Y, then forever after it is in form Y. But if I
    transcode it to form Y, then it stays in form X and is
    transcoded to form Y whenever I need it.]]

    At that point, I observed that Augment data could reasonably
    be transcoded into the "normal form" used in the repository.
    That would work because, unlike HTML pages, information
    segments in the Augment database have fixed IDs -- so adding
    or modifying data in the repository would not shuffle IDs
    around. (An innocuous edit to an HTML page, on the other hand,
    could turn previously created links into gibberish. The links
    would "succeed", but be be pointing to the wrong paragraphs.)

    [[On the way out the door, Lee observed that the whole DDOM
    could well be built on a Gnutella foundation in order to
    eliminate the browser/server distinction. A person's
    repository would then act as server as well as a client
    application. That is exactly how the ideal system must
    operate, so that prospect was rather exciting, as well.]]

    [[Of course, as Lee commented, we would want to "wrap" the
    Gnutella interface in a layer of function calls, so that
    we could replace Gnutella with a different system merely
    by rewriting the function library (rather than modifying
    the system). But that is straight forward system-design
    stuff.]]

    Other News
    -----------
    It turns out that Lee has been given the go-ahead to work
    on this project, so he has been able to devote some quality
    time to it. [[Yay!]] He has now installed Zope as well
    as Slashdot. Unlike Slashdot, he found Zope a breeze to
    install. The system appears highly usable, as well. So
    it is a strong candidate for our next discussion tool.

    Lee mentioned that the Zope folk are also at work on a
    "Portal Tool Kit" that would include newsgroups, mail
    lists, and the Wikis (anyone can edit your web page)
    collaborative editing system. All of which makes it an
    interesting vehicle for use and/or hacking.

    [[The only other viable candidate for that honor, it would
    appear, is the JavaCorporate suite of collaboration tools.
    (It seems reasonable to rule out Slashdot, PHP/Slashdot,
    and Arsdigita based on language and installation issues.)

    [[Note that where Zope uses Python and acts as its own server,
    JavaCorporate uses Java and uses the Apache server. Which
    is design is more modular and hackable remains to be seen.

    [[In either case, it occurs to me now, we have good options
    for processing XML structures. The w3c DOM standard puts the
    whole DOM into memory at once -- fine for documents, but
    pretty horrible when your "DOM" is in fact a disk-resident
    database. Python has a (badly named) EasySAX model that
    lets you instantiate only the subtree you need in memory.
    (SAX is the Simple API for XML. It's another way of processing
    XML. But "SmallDOM' would have been a better name.) Meanwhile,
    Java has a JDOM model that lets you do the same thing.]]

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