Technical How To

XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0 are widely supported.

Unfortunately, XPath 1.0 doesn't come with mathematical functions such as "sqrt", "sin", "cos", "ln",... XPath 2.1 surely will but we'll have to wait to see it available in every environment.

Because such functions may be required for graphics generation, a workaround has to be used. Hopefully, named templates can be defined with XSLT 1.0: a name, one or more parameters and every XSLT 1.0 possibility, recursion to be used instead of loops. Read more »

You may remember a similar demo back in the open beta timeframe.  Now, the IBM Thin Client for XML with WebSphere Application Server v7.0 is available based upon the shipping version of the XML Feature Pack.  The following video will show you how to get up and running in about five minutes (including download time). Read more »

Kurt wrote a detailed sample about creating a widget enabling multiple files upload in a single form post

http://www.xmltoday.org/content/creating-file-upload-widget-exist-and-xquery

How to do with XSLTForms .

In the code listing in the above link Read more »

How to and strange problem 

I discovered a trick to upload files with XSLTForms  Read more »

Author's Note: When I first wrote this I had been working under the assumption that the XBL2 code hosted on Google was in fact a Google project. I have since learned that it was the brainchild of Sergey Ilinsky (http://www.ilinsky.com/), who has more recently been working on a number of other rich Internet applications.My apologies for any confusion this may have caused. Read more »

Over the weekend, a client of mine was hacked, part of what seems to have been a broad, rootkit based attack that took out a number of sites in what appeared to be prep work for zombification of servers for spam delivery. I won't give out the details of this particular incident, as we're still trying to figure out the exact exploit, but it brought to light a few facets of emergency preparedness that should be thought about when dealing with XML databases in particular. Read more »

Recently, I remarked that JSON vs XML arguments somewhat invalid ... mainly due to the fact that JSON is applicable to a much smaller subset of scenarios then XML.

The example I use to illustrate JSON's constraints was too imagine creating a database where the internal representation (no not binary on disk persistence) was JSON ... which probably implies that one would be using some javascript to query and generate views from the database; something I don't want to contemplate. Read more »

I thoroughly enjoy working with most XML databases, but one of the features that I especially like working with is the fact that you can treat collections as a form of file system - up to and including using graphical file managers to drag and drop files directly into the database. This magic is accomplished via the power of a particular protocol called WebDAV (the DAV in this case standing for Distributed Authoring and Versioning, and can be thought of as an early form of RESTful services). Read more »

Sometimes the best way to learn a language is to do something in it that doesn't immediately jump out and say "This should be a FOO app.". I ran into this last week when I'd taken my nine year old daughter to lunch after school got out early. We have gotten into the habit of doing her homework during these times, both so that I can get a better sense of what she's working on and how she's doing. Read more »

This article (and the accompanying comments) were originally posted on Nov 10, 2009. Because I think many of the comments are as useful as the initial article, I'm including them as addenda to the article. I hope to have more information on Xorion shortly, as it's developing rather nicely. -- Kurt Cagle Read more »