5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards April 28 – 30, 2008 Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill Web Tools A Technical Perspective Tim Bornholtz

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards RSS XML file published to a web site Aggregators periodically retrieve your file (This is slightly different than I said in the business session)

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards RSS – Versions Version OwnerProsStatusRecommendation RSS 0.91UserLandVery simpleOfficially obsolete by 2.0 but still widely used Use for basic syndication RSS 1.0RSS-DEV Working Group RDF basedStable coreUse for RDF-based applications RSS 2.0UserLandEasy migration from 0.9x, widely accepted Stable core, active module development Use for general purpose metadata rich syndication Atom 1.0IETF (RFC 4287) Open standard, widely accepted Official IETF standard Use whenever possible

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards RSS 2.0 vs Atom RSS 2.0 Plaintext or escaped HTML (no way to signify which) RFC 822 date format US ASCII only More widely adopted Atom Explicitly set content type (plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, and binary) RFC 3339 date format (XML standard) Supports Unicode Not as widely adopted but more flexible

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Sample Feed Current news entries en-us Tue, 27 Apr :00:00 GMT Article Title As much of the article as you wish to display here Tue, 26 Apr :39:21 GMT

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards How to implement Determine the content Generate the XML feed Assign a well recognized URL Post the RSS feed on your website Use common images for linking Modify existing HTML to include link to feed

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Developer Tools Source Code Tools publish RSS Project Management Tools –Calendar RSS with every milestone –RSS with all recent activities Bug tracking tools –RSS for my outstanding bugs

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Web sites as web services Website APIs – Usually REST based but many are SOAP based Unstructured information gives way to structured information Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, Amazon, YouTube, and many more

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Hotjobs RSS feed

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5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Google code sample

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Mashups Using the APIs of two or more sites to create a new site Yahoo! Pipes At this point it is more of a curiosity and a collection of interesting ideas than a business driver.

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Mobile Web Browsers Many Ajax calls will not work on a mobile phone Section 508 compliant web sites require very little changes to work on a mobile phone

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Considering dynamic languages Many recent improvements in web frameworks Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python Designed specifically for developing web sites Quick development speed Long term maintainability

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards "Jesus reflected on his situation and felt irrepressible sadness. His tear-ducts filled to a point where they could hold no longer and had to be released."

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards "Jesus reflected on his situation and felt irrepressible sadness. His tear-ducts filled to a point where they could hold no longer and had to be released." Vs “Jesus wept.”

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Source:

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Ruby on Rails Ruby is the programming language –Pure object oriented –Interpreted scripting language –Loosely typed language Rails is the web framework –Full stack framework –Model-View-Controller pattern –Ajax built in

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Ruby on Rails Benefits Vastly reduced code footprint Zero configuration DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself Rapid development methodology Ajax UI support IDE automation not required Open source Integrated testing

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Ruby on Rails Cautions Relatively new framework Difficult to retrofit to existing database schemas The Rails way or the wrong way – no middle ground

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Rails demo

5 th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards Questions Tim Bornholtz (540)