RFC: RSS 2.0 and the MetaWeblog API [Scripting News]

Ugh, holy hacking batman. The more XMLRPC gets put to the test, the more is shows just how weak it really is. It's only based on simple well-formed XML, so that's as far as it can go without hacking things like this:

If you wish to transmit an element that is part of a namespace include a sub-struct in the struct passed to newPost and editPost whose name is the URL that specifies the namespace. The sub-element(s) of the struct are the value(s) from the namespace that you wish to transmit.

Wow... nasty. :\

This would be an absolute XML no-brainer in SOAP. Perhaps it's time to work on a SOAP based weblogging API.

Yet another useful article from the MSDN Web Services center. The DIME specification is one that I wish was better established about two years ago when we (meaning my company) revamed our upload protocols. Come to think of it, even SOAP wasn't established enough. So we've hand rolled our own XML message format and in between there's a straight HTTP 1.1 chunked upload. The XML messages are custom schema and are used to initiate, resume, finalize and terminate uploads. Next version will be definitely be SOAP+DIME... can't wait!

Visual XSLT TryOut. I've been hearing about ActiveState's Visual XSLT tool quite a bit, and I was quite intrigued by it, but never found the time to give it a through test. This weekend finally the opportunity presented itself, so I downloaded the trial version and gave it a go.

...

Although I did run into a few gotchas, I did get a feel for the power of the tool (it even works with includes and all). Most definitely, this is a tool I'd love to have on my arsenal, so I guess it's savings time so that I can afford it in a few months... not very soon, though :( [Commonality]

I agree. I tried it out back when it was originally released and was quite impressed with it's capabilities as well. I wasn't doing all that much work with XSLT at the time, so I didn't really have the need to buy it. However, we're migrating our systems over to .NET and XSLT should play a bigger role. If so, I'll definitely recommend purchasing a copy for my company.

A new article popped up on MSDN the other day which covers the basics of the WS-Security specification. I like the article because the author starts off by explaining why the WS-Security specification was needed and gives good real world examples of where it's applicable. The author then describes the WS-Security SOAP header and how it is intended to be processed. Finally, the author delves into the guts of the spec and gives more detail on the various forms of signing and encryption that can be used.