Monkinetic Weblog

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use[#directives](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/directives) in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of[#directives](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/directives) that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.

This is excellent news. The Woz is starting a new company ("Wheels of Zeus", aka "wOz")to make wireless consumer handhelds, to "help everyday people track everyday things".

Good luck, Woz!

Oh wow! splorp.blog has been updating and I missed it! May it never be! The truth is, Grant had not pinged weblogs.com I think, and my Trackerpane had not picked it up.

Happy happy joy joy!

Apple has posted a wrapup of Mac OS X-related announcements from NAMM, a "bi-annual musical markets convention" in LA. Looks like some cool stuff going on.

For future reference, I've archived the post about non-typed languages and IDL here.

Charles Wiltgen, (former?) Quicktime product manager, offers this .NET primer for Mac users. Why .NET is going to affect us, and why it can be a Good Thing(tm).

It's a good read, very basic, and he makes some very good points. I'll have to finish the article before passing judgement, but read it for yourself and see what you think.

Best line: It's the end of Windows as we know it, and I feel fine.

Jim is "urgently in need of work". If you need an awesome coder, a great mentor, or all-around great guy in your company, check him out.

Be aware - Jim needs to work remotely, and he's by far the one I would bet one if I could hire a teleworker. He's motivated, creative, and productive.

David P. Reed is discussing some fundemental questions about the process of dividing up the radio spectrum to provide "non-interference" between electromagnetic devices.

As is often the case, this great quote applies simultanously to technology and human behavior:

And the basic question of the limits on "spectrum capacity", as a scientific question, is slowly developing answers - surprising ones. It turns out that network cooperation increases capacity.

"I am the BlogTracker TrackerPane. I OWN you."

Techno-Weenie has a proposal for a Common XML-RPC API for Weblogs. While I tend to think of such things as a good idea, in this case I think the API is too specific to Blogger and Manila - the two largest blog hosting services.

I've been working on something fun for RadioConversant. ;-)

I've started working on some enhancements to Radio Conversant.

Todd Gureckis has a cool photography-based weblog, including comments on each photo. Very cool. Also check out his well-designed main site here.

I like finding new ways that people are branching the weblog concept.

Of Radio Conversant. Please stand by.

Unfortunately, due to the recent discovery of an AIM exploit, our firewall admin has closed off AIM. Smart move, except that the exploit is specific to the Windows version of the AOL Instant Messenger client - not clones, and not on non-Windows machines. I, on the other hand, use Adium on Mac OS X.

Therefore, for now, if you need to get ahold of me you can use email.

I just saw on Conversant's support site that Conversant is not tied directly to Frontier's object database for storing data. Instead, Macrobyte has written a database access layer and driver architecture to abstract that away from the groupware app itself.

Unfortunately, due to the recent discovery of an AIM exploit, our firewall admin has closed off AIM. Smart move, except that the exploit is specific to the Windows version of the AOL Instant Messenger client - not clones, and not on non-Windows machines. I, on the other hand, use Adium on Mac OS X.

I have a quandry: Jodi and I have been invited to a friends house for dinner tonight with a bunch of other people (many of whom I'm thinking we will not know). I think it might be fun to go, but I don't do extended social engagements as well as Jodi does. I'm more inclined to go bouldering at my favorite rock house. What to do?

Via more like this, a good explanation of why HTML clicked for me, and later on, for Jodi. "In WordPerfect you could "reveal codes" and fix things that weren't quite right. "