The New Breed of Version Control Systems

CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, is showing its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs.

Fish, Shlomi. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Content Management>Programming>Databases

O'Reilly Indexing Guru

Turn to the index in the back of any O'Reilly book published in the last five years and chances are you're looking at the handiwork of O'Reilly's resident indexing guru, Seth Maislin. Though indexes are the most frequently fingered section of any computer book, they remain the one element most taken for granted. Those ostensibly logical, orderly columns of subject-page references belie the complexity of indexing. The craft of indexing involves much more than the mere alphabetization of a book's key words. It requires something that is at once science and art form, the product of someone painstakingly fleshing out a book's information design while copiously accounting for nuances of language and word associations. You might say an index is like a fingerprint: intricate, revealing, utterly unique.

Houston, Lori. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Indexing>Web Design

The O'Reilly Radar Blog

The O'Reilly Radar blog will track what we're tracking, and turn the blips into conversations.

Dornfest, Rael. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Content Management>User Centered Design>Blogging

Open Source Licenses Are Not All the Same

One of the most significant developments in the software and web development community in the past few years has been the increased use of open source software. It's vital for any programmer, web designer, or other computer professional to understand that open source licenses are not all the same. The differences between licenses can have a big impact on how you may use or distribute the software.

Fishman, Stephen. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Intellectual Property>Open Source

OpenOffice.org and Me: An Introduction

When I first tried OOo, it was at around version 1.0.0 or 1.0.1. The help files were pathetic in those days; I described them at the time as 'badly written, badly organized, badly indexed, and frequently wrong.' To be fair, the help has improved a great deal since then, though the indexing still needs a lot of improvement.

Weber, Jean Hollis. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Word Processing>Software>OpenOffice

Pretty-Print XML Using a Generic Identity Stylesheet and Xalan

Sometimes your XML output from various programs is less than attractive. Spruce it up in a hurry with Xalan C++ and an identity transform.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>Style Sheets>XML

Programming Web Services with SOAP

The task of creating and deploying web services is really not all that difficult, nor is it all that different than what developers currently do in more traditional web applications. The tendency on all platforms is to automate more and more of the gory details and tedious work in creating web services. Most programmers don't need to know the exact details of encodings and envelopes; instead, they'll simply use a SOAP toolkit such as those described here.

Snell, James, Doug Tidwell and Pavel Kulchenko. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Design>Web Design>Programming>XML

Python and XML

Python and XML are two very different animals, each with a rich history. Python is a full-scale programming language that has grown from scripting world roots in a very organic way, through the vision and guidance of Python's inventor, Guido van Rossum. Guido continues to take into account the needs of Python developers as Python matures. XML, on the other hand, though strongly impacted by the ideas of a small cadre of visionaries, has grown from standards-committee roots. It has seen both quiet adoption and wrenching battles over its future. Why bother putting the two technologies together?

Jones, Christopher A. and Fred L. Drake. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Information Design>Programming>XML

RELAX NG: Complex Patterns  

One of the key differentiations between compositors and simple patterns is that compositors are patterns that don’t directly map to any individual element withinthe schema. I emphasize this distinction because it can be easy to forget when focusing on a schema instead of the instance document.

van der Vlist, Eric. O'Reilly and Associates (2003). Articles>Information Design>XML

Rich Web Text Editing with Kupu

Kupu is an open source application, written in JavaScript, that implements a flexible, full-featured HTML editor that runs in a web page without any special plugins. Its primary use is as an embedded editor in content management systems (CMS), like Zope or Plone, where it allows users to create their own web pages. Its design is flexible enough so that you can embed it into pretty much any web application without too much difficulty.

Jones, Robert. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Design>Web Design>Content Management>Plone

The Sanctity of Elements, or Why You Shouldn't Be Double-Clicking in a TEXTAREA

All-too-frequently an external client or an internal manager or co-worker demands interface changes. They usurp the design process -- taking the decision-making away from the experts -- and deign the interface by dictum rather than traditional development processes, to the detriment of the product.

Hourihan, Meg. O'Reilly and Associates (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Usability

Search Systems  

This chapter often uses examples of search systems from sites that allow you to search the entire Web, as well as site-specific search engines. Although these web-wide tools tend to index a very broad collection of content, it is extremely useful to study them. Of all search systems, none has undergone the testing, usage, and investment that web-wide search tools have, so why not benefit from their research? Many of these tools are available for use on local sites as well.

Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville. O'Reilly and Associates (2003). Design>Web Design>Search

Spelling and Other Tools  

This section shows you how to use Word’s spelling, grammar, and research tools. You also learn how to hyphenate documents, print envelopes and labels, and work with XML.

Glenn, Walter. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Word Processing>Software>Microsoft Word

SQL Cookbook: Advanced Searching  

Some types of searching operations stand apart from others in that they represent a different way of thinking about searching. Perhaps you're displaying a result set one page at a time. Half of that problem is to identify (search for) the entire set of records that you want to display. The other half of that problem is to repeatedly search for the next page to display as a user cycles through the records on a display. Your first thought may not be to think of pagination as a searching problem, but it can be thought of that way, and it can be solved that way; that is the type of searching solution this chapter is all about.

Molinaro, Anthony. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Search

SQL Functions

A function is a special type of command word in the SQL99 command set. In effect, functions are one-word commands that return a single value. The value of a function can be determined by input parameters, as with a function that averages a list of database values. But many functions do not use any type of input parameter.

Kline, Kevin and Daniel Kline. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Information Design>Databases>SQL

SQL Tuning  

Even if the vast number of end users leads to high calculation loads outside the database, you can generally throw hardware at the application load (the load outside the database, that is), hanging as many application servers as necessary off the single central database.

Tow, Dan. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Information Design>Databases>SQL

Take My Advice: Don't Learn XML

If you're a developer interested only in the data-oriented side of XML, and if you don't care about document authoring (writing books, articles, manuals, love poems, Web pages, whatever), feel free to ignore this article. If, on the other hand, document authoring is important to you (you're a technical writer, an HTML markup author, manager of a documentation group, an anonymous pamphleteer) and you're trying to decide whether it would be worthwhile for you to learn XML and use it for authoring documents, stick around. What you learn might save you a lot of time and spare you from some unnecessary frustration.

Smith, Michael. O'Reilly and Associates (2000). Design>Web Design>Writing>XML

Technical Writing Using OpenOffice.org Writer

If you're in the business of writing technical documents and you've been using Word in particular, you could benefit by switching to OpenOffice.org Writer. OpenOffice.org Writer is a strong competitor to Word for both drafts and final layout (desktop publishing) of many technical documents because it combines some of the best features of Word and FrameMaker. Indeed, Writer does several things better or easier than each of them.

Weber, Jean Hollis. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Word Processing>Software>OpenOffice

Transforming XML with XSLT  

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language designed to provide presentation for the content of XML documents. It is composed of three parts: XSLT, XPath, and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). In this chapter, I'll show you XSLT and the .NET assembly that deals with it, System.Xml.Xsl. But first, some background.

Bornstein, Niel M. O'Reilly and Associates (2003). Design>Information Design>XML>XSL

Trust and Zeal in Open Source Advocacy

People who are unfamiliar with open source generally don't like evangelists--at all. This is particularly true for managers who may take the same disdain to evangelists that they take to salespeople and marketers.

Bacon, Jono. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Open Source

Unravel the OpenOffice File Format

OpenOffice provides a suite of applications whose native file format consists of a set of XML files, compressed into a ZIP archive. This article explores the basics of the OpenOffice file format.

O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>OpenOffice

Use Character and Entity References

Not all characters are available on the keyboard! This hack shows you how to represent such characters in an XML document by using decimal and hexadecimal character references, and how to represent entities by using entity references.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML

Using Ajax  

Put a new shine on your web applications. Tired of clunky web interfaces and waiting around for a page to reload? Well, it’s about time to give your web apps that pine-scented desktop application feel. What are we talking about? Just the newest thing to hit the Web: Ajax—asynchronous JavaScript and XML—and your ticket to building rich Internet applicationsthat are more interactive,responsive, and easy to use. So, grab your trial-size Ajax,included with every copy of Head Rush Ajax:we’re about to put some polish on your web apps.

McLaughlin, Brett D. O'Reilly and Associates (2006). Design>Web Design>Interaction Design>Ajax

Validate RSS and Atom Documents

Use an online validator to check your RSS and Atom documents.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>Standards>RSS

What We're Doing When We Blog

Every day it seems another article about weblogs appears in the press. At first, most of these stories seemed content to cover the personal nature of blogging. But more and more I'm seeing articles that attempt to examine the journalistic and punditry aspects of weblogs prominent in many of the so-called 'warblogs,' or sites that began in response to the events of September 11th

Hourihan, Meg. O'Reilly and Associates (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging