Older blog entries for ade (starting at number 48)

47: First past the post

Syndicated 2010-05-08 23:37:00 (Updated 2010-07-10 10:24:41) from Ade Oshineye

Apprenticeship Patterns is now Creative Commons licensed

Just over 5 years ago Dave and I started Apprenticeship Patterns on a wiki. We used that wiki to organize the stories we found as we went around the world asking people how they became skilled software developers. When O'Reilly approached us about turning our wiki into an actual book printed on dead trees we were delighted but we also emphasised our desire to share the ideas with the widest possible audience. Fortunately O'Reilly are an incredibly englightened publishing house and they were already thinking about ways to get their books into the Creative Commons.

Just like we were one of the first O'Reilly books to experiment with using a wiki to get early feedback during the writing process we're also one of the first O'Reilly books to experiment with publishing our material under a Creative Commons license. Starting from today the book is now available here: http://apprenticeship-patterns.labs.oreilly.com/

We're using O'Reilly's experimental Open Feedback Publishing system which lets people, after registering, attach comments to any section of the book. If there's ever a second edition your feedback will be an essential part of it so please don't be shy.

Syndicated 2010-05-03 17:47:00 (Updated 2010-05-03 17:47:54) from Ade Oshineye

Communicating with atoms

A few weeks ago I attended an Open Source Jam where the topic was "building blocks." I gave a lightning talk about why the combination of Atom and Webhooks is changing the way web applications interoperate. In this set of blog posts I'd like to flesh out that 5 minute presentation and explain how Atom is potentially a universal payload format for the web in the same way that byte streams are a universal payload format for Unix.

• Part 1: Communicating with atoms¹
• Part 2: Webhooks
• Part 3: JSONistas and XMLheads

Here's the problem. I have N different web apps that I want to connect to each other in arbitrary ways. Some of these web apps don't exist yet and some of them will be written by people I don't know who won't ask permission before they connect their web apps to mine.

In an enterprise environment we'd solve this using some kind of common messaging infrastructure or/and a universal data format. We would then deal with the inevitable pain as the evolution of the different web applications broke compatibility or locked the entire system into moving at the pace of the slowest team.

On the web we don't have that luxury. But Atom can help.

The Atom specification includes a number of simple-looking features which solve complex problems and open up the possibility of using Atom entries as a universal payload format for interoperability across the web.

The basic structure of an Atom document requires either an atom:feed or atom:entry as the top level element. Apart from that you must have an atom:id, an atom:author, atom:link, atom:title and an atom:updated². Everything else is optional.

Since Atom is based on XML it has support for namespaces. This makes it possible for you to take an atom:entry and enrich it with new tags that only make sense in the context of your application. For instance the Activity Streams specification adds lots of new tags. However it also uses lots of tags from other specifications. It extends Atom and re-uses Atom Threading Extensions, Atom Media Extensions, xCal, PortableContacts and GeoRSS. The feed ends up looking like this: