What · Technology · Atom
ruby go-mongrel.rb and there’s your Ape on port 4000. Simon will probably have checked that in by the time you read this.type="html" text constructs so I can clean ’em up ...mod-atom.net which will be driven, of course, by mod_atom ...<description> element, he says <description/>. Now, that’s the kind of pedantry I can relate to.xml:base and relative URIs. I fixed that up, and managed to convince Sam Ruby that one of the warnings (due to a redirect from tbray.org to www.tbray.org) was bogus. So the validator’s happy. I also took a little extra trouble to prettify the feed, and now I think it’s probably useful as an example of a fairly full-featured and ultra-squeaky-clean Atom 1.0 feed; somewhat human-readable, even. Have a look at my feed and Sam’s side-by-side, his is very readable too, there are some points where the difference between Sam’s choices and mine are instructive. Anyone have a suggestion on how my feed might be improved, to serve even better as an example?rel="self" instead of rel="alternate", and they provide published but not updated timestamps. Both totally forgivable in a 1.0 release, and presumably easy to fix. Take-away: we need to have better tutorial material (others have made the same self/alternate mistake), and to do better at telling the world about the Feed Validator.xml:base and relative links from working, notably including this one. We do make progress. Now if Bloglines would just get a clue...curl. I managed to introspect the server, list the entries, create a new entry, update it, and delete it. I screwed up the messaging a few times, and Dave’s server only blew chunks about half of them. Those who know what curl is are probably snickering now. But I think the fact that you can debug a nontrivial application with curl -X -i -d -H is a significant weapon in the quiver of RESTafarians. Let’s see ya do that with your SOAP + WSDL + WS-Policy + WS-Addressing + WS-MetadataExchange + WS-ReliableMessaging app. Actually, the big take-away isn’t that, it’s that the Atom protocol is simple and easy to implement and robust. The world needs something like this. Later: Hey, more Atom Protocol stuff from Joe Gregorio over at XML.com.this.atom, that.atom, and the-other.atom being dished out by Web Servers everywhere, and by default those servers are gonna look at the names and say “Dot-atom what? Yer text/plain, punk.” So I appealed to Greg Stein of Apache and Google, and he had a pow-wow and reported back I've gone ahead and done this: the application/atom+xml (for .atom) type will appear in our next releases (Apache 1.3.32 and Apache 2.0.51), whenever those come out. Well, Apache’s not the only server out there, so I wrote off to Obasanjo and Scoble and said “Here’s the problem, how about IIS?”. So Scoble did some digging and got routed to Thomas Deml, lead program manager on IIS, and I saw a forwarded email saying The change goes into Win2K3, SP1. Now if we could sort out the rest of the Internet’s issues that smoothly... anyhow, thanks guys.
