Grains

We push technology along slowly, gaining a bit here and a bit there. Most improvements, in anything, are incremental; the big advances, every one of ’em, are rooted in the fertile soil whose grains are all those little steps forward. Here are a few grains. Item: Bruce Eckel squeezes XML into a single Python class. Item: Niall Kennedy pulls together all the syndication specs you might need; for example see atom.feedspecs.com or itunes.feedspecs.com. Item: Peter Thomas pulls together a spine-chilling graphic mapping what happens around a Hibernate storeItem call. Question: is what this picture shows a problem or not? Item: Charles Nutter pushes the JRuby Gems along, interestingly (and read the comments).