Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

BC LIONS – Lui Passaglia

We went to Dairy Queen on Douglas Street for lunch today. Part way through the meal, Lui Passaglia (or a perfect clone) and his family sit down at the table next to us.

I really wanted to go over and shake his hand, tell him how much I loved to watch him play (he played for the BC Lions of the CFL from 1976 until 2000!) but I was too shy. He holds the record for most points by a professional football player... more than any other CFL or NFL player.

Darnit. Wow, that was cool.

SnapMail

MacCentral: SnapMail 3.0 adds voice messaging, dictionary, more

SnapMail looks pretty cool.

Fax It Up, Scotty

Fax It Up, Scotty

What's even cooler is that for $150,000 you can buy one too!

WSDL for Radio UserLand

Disclaimer: I don't know WSDL, I'm only guessing what information it provides.

Proving a WSDL file is a way to make it easier for developers to use get started with your web service in their environment easily.

Imagine this Radio developer workflow (it's okay, workflow is good!):

(menubar) Web Services > Add Web Services

Dialog box pops up asking for an URL to a WSDL file.  If the clipboard contains an URL it picks it up.  Click OK.

Radio spits out messages in the message window telling the user it's parsing.  "Done!"

A rich outline appears which contains a listing of all the WSDL files that have been parsed.  The node for the WSDL file just parsed is expanded.  A list of the methods it exposes are listed underneath.  Expand the method and the parameters are listed.  Each parameter's icon represents the datatype of that parameter.  If WSDL has comments and URLs to docs those are provided in the outline too.  Right menus, double clicking, expanding, whatever.

Right click on the node for the method and choose Build calling code.  A new script outline appears with a complete script fragment for calling the SOAP method.

Right click on the node for the WSDL file and choose Build Client Glue for this Service.   Churn churn churn, and a new Tool GDB window appears with a table of scripts for calling all the methods defined in in the WSDL interface.

Right click on the node for the WSDL file and choose Build Server Glue for this Service.  Churn churn churn, and a new Tool GDB window appears with a table of SOAP handler scripts that implement the skeleton of the WSDL interface.

That's how WSDL provides value to SOAP developers, and how it could provide value to Radio/Frontier developers.

PS: This entry posted to my Conversant weblog via HTML mail in Outlook Express.

Why WSDL?

To Dave Winer, who's having problems understanding the motivation for WSDL:

WSDL is to Web Services as IDL is to CORBA and TypeLibs (.tlb files) are to COM and AETEs are to AppleEvents. They describe the interfaces that are available from the service.

These are useful for a lot of reasons, one being that modern development environments (such as MS Visual Studio) can parse these files and offer very very useful context-sensitive information while the developer is coding.

While you're typing in the name of an exposed method the names and types of its parameters pop up where you're typing in the editor... you can hit a key to have it finish the name of a method (akin to command completion in some UNIX shells like tcsh), and do real-time syntax checking. For a developer using a fancy dev environment, this can improve performance dramatically.

You can create an "object browser" type of GUI that lets you see what commands are available, and make it easy to set up calls to those commands.

Lots of good reasons, that's just a couple.

Taleban says most of ancient Buddhas destroyed

CNN.com: Taleban says most of ancient Buddhas destroyed

[venomous profanities deleted]

Group finds extensive problems in U.S. health care

Group finds extensive problems in U.S. health care

Yikes. Canada's health care sucks too, but in different ways.

Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language

Apple has updated one of the great books on Object Oriented Programming. This book has been cited in Java books by Sun (or so I've been told) as one to read to learn OO.

Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language (HTML)

or get the PDF version

Objective-C is a very fun language to develop in. I can't understand the stigma it's received. I learned Objective-C in a couple of days, on my own, by reading this book. It's a superset of ANSI C. It was EASY to learn.

Check it out!

the Design Experience

Dave Bauer's site: the Design Experience

Dave's relearning Algebra and Calculus in preparation for starting a Computer Science degree.

He recommended this book for re-learning algebra: Product Info for Quick Algebra Review: A Self-Teaching Guide, 2E

Dave is inspirational. Not just his educational goals, but also the goals of his software project which is explained on his web site.