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Upcoming talks on RDF, RDFa and XForms

Submitted by administrator on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 12:50.

May is going to be pretty busy with talks about XForms, RDF and RDFa coming up.

First up is my talk XForms, REST, XQuery...and skimming at XTech 2008. The talk embraces themes I've been pursuing for a couple of years now; that as we put more functionality into the client, and servers get 'cleverer', it becomes much easier to build sophisticated web applications. Of course server technologies are moving so fast now that this whole approach is making more and more sense, so I'm looking forward to taking in recent developments in my talk. For example, both Amazon and Google effectively have 'databases in the cloud' that can be used to store data and query it, via APIs, with literally no configuration.

A few weeks later I'm going to be giving a tutorial on RDF at SemTech. This is an interesting development for me, because RDF and the semantic web were always my first interests--before XForms and before XHTML 2. (As well as writing RDF parsers, and designing applications, I also contributed chapters on RDF and RDFS to a couple of books on metadata and XML.)

But one problem I always had when trying to build semantic-web applications was that defining the user interface was pretty hairy. This was partly because RDF Schema is tricky to process, but also because HTML was insufficiently powerful in its core feature-set, so the translation from RDF to HTML involved a lot of work.

The need for a user interface language that was much richer than HTML was therefore why I got involved in the XForms standard (and worked with a team of people to produce the first fully conforming XForms processor, formsPlayer). So although it may not seem directly connected to the semantic web, I believe that in the coming period XForms will start to become a key part of the semantic web's architecture.

Another problem I kept coming up against whilst developing for the semantic web was the difficulty in actually publishing metadata. In particular I always found it frustrating that there was a lot of really useful metadata just sitting in ordinary web pages, and no-one could get at it. Attempting to resolve this problem gave rise to RDFa, and I'm excited that the RDFa in XHTML working draft is extremely close to becoming a stable recommendation. And as interest in RDFa grows, I'm pleased to say that some of my other presentations in May will be 'tech talks' on RDFa at Yahoo!, eBay and Google. (I'm really excited that I might be getting to meet some of the guys behind Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey.)

My final talk of the month will be at the excitingly-named Kings of Code, and I'm looking forward to talking about XHTML, XHTML 2, HTML 5, XAML, and anything else I can think of in relation to web languages.

Skimming, and an Open Source project for a GData XForms client

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 05/01/2007 - 15:51.

For me, one of the most exciting developments on the web in recent years has been the growth in services that let you manage raw data. Many of the most useful such services originate when some web-based application--such as Google calendars or spreadsheets--exposes the underlying data. For example, with Google Spreadsheets, it's possible to use ATOM to query spreadsheets for certain values, or add rows and columns, making this a very powerful way of storing data 'in the cloud'. (See Web 2.0, Copernicus and Spartacus: Moving the centre of the web.)

We're building quite a few XForms applications that make full use of this power, and it's something I'll be talking about at XTech 2007, in my session XForms, REST, XQuery...and skimming. Since the approach we use could work on any XForms processor, talking to any ATOM-based server, we've decided to create an open source project to host the forms, and document their use. If this is an area of interest to you, check out the GData XForms client project on Google Code, and its discussion forum.

Tech Talk at Google on Sidewinder

Submitted by administrator on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 22:01.

T. V. Raman, one of the key architects of XForms, invited me to do a Tech Talk at Google. The talk was on Monday, and looked at Sidewinder and our approach to using web languages to create desktop applications--XHTML, XForms, RDFa and so on. Although I really enjoyed doing the talk and having the opportunity to explain at length to a load of techies what exactly it is that we're doing, my overriding memory is already that of the lunch afterwards. Unfortunately, the lunch was not captured on video, although they do record the tech talks:

The abstract for the talk was as follows:

Web applications use HTTP to communicate with relevant services and manifest their user ... all ยป interface via HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With the advent of different gadget frameworks, they have finally broken free of the shackles of the Web browser to manifest themselves on the user's desktop as first-class productivity tools.

In this talk I'll describe Sidewinder, a framework for authoring and deploying web applications that are created as first-class desktop citizens. Applications created in this framework can not only communicate with the web, but with each other, turning the whole platform into a powerful tool for creating mashup applications. Sidewinder can also turn any other web application into a desktop application, such as GCal, KoolIM, Google Docs, and so on.

Another powerful aspect of the Sidewinder framework is the ability to display custom widgets based on the type of the data being processed--chosen dynamically at run-time. This kind of flexibility is crucial when building desktop mash-ups based on varying sources of web-based information, and Sidewinder goes further by making it easy to process the data-oriented web--including microformats and RDFa.

The presentation will include a number of rich internet applications that use the Sidewinder framework.