Sylvain Wallez

I wish you all, known and unknown readers, a happy new year. Feel free to add comments so that you are less unknown ;-)

Matthew writes a funny modern Christmas tale. Do you think Santa has read ClueTrain ?

Happy Christmas to all of you !

IBM buys Rational ! In the IDE market, Borland also recently acquired TogetherSoft which had just bought Webgain.

All these companies are members of the Eclipse Consortium, my IDE of choice. What does it mean for its future ?

Something that, among others, explains the fast acceptance of Eclipse is the support of many various companies. If they all buy each other, will it end with IBM being alone (plus Oracle which just joined) ? And so, will it still be Eclipse, or a free WSAD-lite ?

One more Cocooner to have a blog : welcome, Nicola Ken !

Also, Ovidiu puts some random pictures from his picture albums on blogs entries. Nice !

Not much active on Cocoon these days : I'm under high load. Several ongoing projects, all being late...

But the interesting news (exclusive for my blog readers!), is that I wrote a CVS source for Cocoon for one of these projects. It's a writeable source, meaning that you can read from and write to a CVS server just as with regular files.

This source doesn't require a local repository, as all operations are performed "live" on the CVS server.

Coming in Cocoon's code base soon ? For me the answer is yes, but some of my colleagues say "let's keep it and sell it".

Some work on the way to convice them opensourcing is good... I'm sure some of you can give me some good arguments (not the usual "please, please I need it").

Discovered Googlism today through Marc.

First thing I asked this engine is not my name, as most egocentric people would have (yeah, I'm often one of those), but my beloved cocoon. And what came out first ? Well, check it out by yourself.

Damn, how can we change the ranking so that the first result disappears ? I like much more the second one !

I started reading Cluetrain, a book that explains the changes implied by the internet in companies both internally and externally, simply because people are able to talk to each other without organisational barriers.

And I was very surprised to find myself nearly portrayed in the "Internet Apocalypso" chapter : "... you had thousands of workers with easy access to free web browsers and a smaller set of folks who had figured out how to set up web servers whose only cost was download and tinkering time. Suddenly there was nothing to prevent the expression of their own ideas and creativity".

Marc is considering Eclipse. He makes some criticism by comparing it with IntelliJ IDEA. I never tried it, but it seems to be the only real competitor to Eclipse, as people complaining about Eclipse are mostly IDEA users. Every other people trying Eclipse (including me) quickly become addicted to its nice features.

Yes, Eclipse currently lacks a good XML editor, but considering the number of plugins that tackle this problem, this shouldn't be true for long.

An interesting analysis of Eric van der Vlist on XML Hack about webservices, their definition and their use.

I basically agree with him saying SOAP is a terrible hack to use a hammer to pin a screw. Something like REST is far more lighter, well suited to the hyperlinked web, and Cocoon is the perfect tool for this.

When it tackles traditional computing (such as client-server applications), the W3C produces nothing really good : XMLSchema and SOAP are both huge and hard to master when more simple specifications (e.g. Relax NG) can perfectly do the job.

Matthew has been nominated to be a new Cocoon committer.

Following the tradition that I started 18 months ago, he introduced himself to the community.

Welcome, Matthew !