langreiter.com plain, simple: 2006-06-30

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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2006-06-30

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6507 days AGO

SIMILE Timeline: "[...] like Google Maps for time-based information." — Pretty darn good. Now add imagery and rescaling ... [ Ø HUB • ]

2006-06-30-simtim

Jon Udell discovers XMLA.

2006-06-30-2bi0'!2bi

Not all is well in E4Xland.

Tony Garnock-Jones wants his S-expressions back (but then, who doesn't?). My biggest gripe is that the language extensions have been, as Tony writes, "short-sightedly restricted to a single class of non-extensible primitives", when it's so obvious (at least it should be) that any collection of objects could benefit greatly from XPath-style data extraction &c.

Attila Szegedi, the new maintainer of Rhino, didn't appear too enthusiastic about the state of the Rhino E4X implementation upon taking over - mainly because of the XMLBeans dependency and a fair number of bugs (few of which seem to be critical in day-to-day use, however).

Nevertheless, support for E4X is growing quickly (and so will the user base, which in turn will crank up the incentive to iron out the bumps): Firefox includes E4X since 1.5, Adobe just released the E4X-capable Flash 9 Player as well as the (free [as in beer]) Flex 2 SDK and Marcello Bastéa-Forte patched Rhino 1.6 to work with Helma.

The conceptual short-comings, unfortunate as they may be, will stay with us for a while - but who knows, maybe E4X is the seed from which, one day, a more comprehensively data-aware JavaScriptalike will spring.

2006-06-30-x4u