SyncML

I finished the first stage in my SyncML implementation work, which was a converter from the WBXML encoding to XML -- I want only to cope with one encoding in the actual SyncML processor itself. The WBXML converter's written in C++, but I intend to do the SyncML manipulation in Python. (This is partly because I couldn't find a C++ XML parser that supported namespaces and had a GPL license, but also partly because I want the flexibility of a scripting language while I fool around with this project.) I've started a SyncML page, which has the first release of this software on it.

As I was starting to write this work up, I discovered a WBXML implementation that must have been started around the same time as mine, released on SourceForge: wbxmllib. If I'd seen this before I'd have been saved days of work, but sometimes things happen this way, I guess. I've now got to decide whether my WBXML parser has a long term future or not.

At the end of the day if nothing else, I figured out some automake for building and installing Python extensions with SWIG.

plone

Over the holiday break I worked on a relaunch of one of my existing web sites, using plone, a content management system based on Zope. I'm very impressed! Combined with my modest Zope skills, I've been able to get an impressive amount of work done in a short time.

The FTP/WebDAV features of Zope made importing the old content pretty easy. My legacy content was in a PHP/MySQL system: I just wrote another template which created barebones HTML with some information into metatags, spidered these with wget, and then copied them via WebDAV into plone.