Balisage 2009 - Those Pesky Namespaces!

Liam Quin (W3C's XML Activity Lead) gave a highly spirited talk on the pros and cons on XML Namespaces, as well as several approaches to simplifying namespace specification. He mentioned solutions proposed by Tim Bray, Micah Dubinko, and Ian Hickson. Quin's own solution was to store namespace declarations in a special namespace file that is processed by XSLT and applied to the files that reference it so they can in turn be validated with normal namespace syntax.

Apparently Liam must be into multimedia presentations. In addition to sporting a very colorful hat, he read a passage from any old book about railroads and showed a video clip of a damsel in distress tied to the tracks. Unfortunately, he ran out of time before we learned the fate of the damsel.

See his Submitted Paper.

Balisage 2009 - XML in the Browser: The Next Decade

Alex Milowski (Appolux) reminded us of the earliest demo on XML in a browser -- Netscape’s 1999 XML book demo from XTech ’99 in which you could sort by author, title, or ISBN using a combination of XML, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At that time, Netscape also had an IRS demo with a table of contents in a sidebar controlling which page is presented (a la JavaDocs). While this might seem like old hat to us in 2009, Milowski ran the demos in recent browsers. The book demo worked in Firefox 3.x, Safari, Android, and iPhone, but failed in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and even 8. The IRs demo was less successful across the board with the exception of Firefox.

He defined Intrinsic Vocabulary as any markup that a browser can natively process with some well-defined non-trivial semantic without the aid of additional constructs. HTML is an example, but XML is not. He is particularly interested in intrinsic support for HTML5, SVG, and MathML, so he created a Firefox extension called XML Application Launcher. After you install the add-on, you can view Alex’s Balisage paper directly as XML in the browser using the Balisage DocBook subset rendered with a popup table of contents with load-on-demand pages. I tried it tonight and it works just fine! on the Google code page, he wrote:

The main idea of this extension is that you can write your own applications, distribute them, and use this tool to launch them based on media type, XML namespace, content matching, or some combination of those three. Eventually the extension will have access to a registry of applications for XML vocabularies so that when an unknown type is encountered it can query for supporting applications.

Milowski concluded his talk with these points:

• We must have HTML5, SVG, and MathML.
• Embrace the idea of intrinsic vocabularies.
• Replicate the browser extension model.
• Support open-source and make it easy to use.
• Don’t wait for someone else to implement it.

See the Submitted Paper.

Balisage 2009 - Opening Remarks and Sponsors

The Balisage 2009 Conference Committee -- B. Tommie Usdin (chair), Deborah A. Lapeyre, James David Mason, Steven R. Newcomb, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen -- opened the 4-day XML conference. One of the well-received announcement was their determination to make Balisage conference proceedings persistent. Unlike some other XML conferences which shall remain nameless (but not blameless), you’ll always be able to find all papers in the series. An ISBN has been assigned to each volume (2 per year), the entire series has an ISSN, and each individual paper has its own DOI (digital object identifier). How cool! Thank you, Mulberry Technologies!

The co-chairs acknowledged the two main sponsors: Mark Logic and the FLWOR Foundation. The FLWOR Foundation is dedicated to providing middleware and clients to simplify the use of XQuery. They have 3 open source projects under an Apache license:Zorba - XQuery processor, XQuery 1.1, update facility, scripting and REST extensions; XQIB (XQuery in the browser) is a browser plugin for Internet Explorer which allows execution of client-side XQuery to navigate and update the DOM; and an Eclipse plugin (XQVT?).

Of course, we all know Mark Logic because they've given us: MarkLogic Server, a native XML database that implements XQuery for the CRUD functionality with full-text and structured search; MarkLogic Application Services which includes Application Builder provides an intuitive, browser-based user interface for creating applications without writing XQuery code; and MarkMail.org, a public email search site built using Mark Logic App Builder which currently archives over 40 million searchable emails.

And Mark Logic is now also known for sponsoring a “Beer and Demo” (more about that later).

And let’s not forget those cool ergonomic pens donated by Patrick Russo (sp?). Don’t confuse them with a tuning fork or wishbone ;-)

Balisage, Come to Me!

Kicking off the conference today (after the logistics, of course), James Mason surprised Tommie Usdin with a song about Balisage. Not sure of the official title (could be simply "Balisage"), but it was set to the tune of Bali Ha'i from South Pacific. As can be seen from the photo, conference chair Usdin was delightfully surprised. Nice job, James et al!

Check back here for the lyrics...

Balisage 2009 - Review and Summary: Processing XML Efficiently

Mike Kay summarized and reviewed the symposium and added his own observations. He was a little surprised that there was nothing about Binary XML and little about speeding up XSLT or XQuery. Kay made the following main points:

Performance against other objective:

• Saxon: first standard conformance, then usability, then performance
  
• performance is not always the most important consideration
  
• David Wheeler (invented the subroutine)- “Optimize the code that users actually write”.
  
• Should you optimize for Joe User or the expert?
  

Performance metrics:

• Response time / latency
  
• throughout
  
• resource cost
  
• scaleability
  
• Jim Robinson: “Good enough for us” -- your own requirements, not the world’s best solution
  

Performance methodology:

• measure
  
• understand - figure out where bottlenecks are and what can be done to improve it
  
• focus on critical components
  
• improve -but if not, don’t leave in the things that didn’t help
  
• repeat until ok - what counts as ok
  

Where are the bottlenecks?

• application-level glue
  
• parsing vs. query?
  
• validation?
  
• conversion to/from XML?
  
• serialization?
  
• query/transformation?
  
• too many phases in the pipeline?
  

What improvements can we expect?

• faster parsing has ben promised?
  
• faster and more scalable transformation
  
• optimized pipelines?
  
• smarter users?
  
• faster hardware
  

Balisage 2009 - Efficient Scripting

David Lee, Epocrates (with a writing assist from Norman Walsh, Mark Logic) discussed Efficient Scripting (Submitted Paper). Scripting is useful for splitting complex workflows into manageable tasks that are easier to debug and easier to develop than with programming languages; the piece part solutions can be glued together later. Lee devised 5 kinds of test cases (2 were baselines) for 4 scripting languages: DOS and bash (Cygwin implementation), xmlsh and xproc (calabash is Norm Walsh’s early XProc implementation). The 2 XML scripting languages performed significantly better than the other two. With approximately 600 XSLT and XQuery operations, xmlsh and xproc yielded 50-75 fold improvement. With 3,000 operations, there was a 150-fold improvement. I believe Lee said there was a 150-200-fold improvement when there were approximately 30,000 operations. It should be noted that the chosen test cases focus on areas where scripting performs worst.

Balisage 2009 - Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently

Michael Kay kicked off the all-day International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently by explaining that the morning would focus mainly on bottom-up hardware-based solutions up to pipeline processing, whereas the afternoon would be more top-down from the application programmer’s viewpoint.

The first presentation was by Michael Leventhal & Eric Lemoine, LSI Corporation, and covered an XML chip in development through this decade. The tokenizer developed by Tarari was originally based on the DOM which didn’t yield vast improvements. By 2004, a new approach called RAX (Random Access XML, simultaneous XPath) proved highly acceleratable, with 40x faster performance than conventional DOM-based. By 2005-6, this work became XMachine, consisting of a Rava stack, XSLT processor, and XTM (XML Threat Management) for streaming large documents. LSI acquired Tarari in 2007. By 2008, the XML chip was selected for HP SAP accelerator, yielding 3x to 4x improvement for enterprise applications. XMachine 2.0 is the 2009 version. The key to this hardware solution is providing a software stack above the hardware, the goal being to accelerate the overall software applications, so XMachine offers of an optimized API. The main design decision for hardware acceleration, they contend, is throughput vs. latency. The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) was a game-changer for their work. LSI has obtained performance numbers of 4.9 Gbps for complex XML processing with documents as large as 4 GB. They believe their new design will accommodate 1 TB documents. According to their Submitted Paper:

Results show that the use of an XML co-processor can reduce CPU cycles per byte of XML processed by amounts ranging from a factor of 3 to a factor of 50 depending on the workload, while power consumption can be reduced by a factor of 7.

One of LSI’s competitor's, DataPower, presented next. David Maze discussed the IBM DataPower XML XG4 processor card, the goal of which is to accelerate throughput and providing parallel processing with a card that can be switched to different processors. Their main use case is SOAP traffic in, access control checking, threat checking, and ensuring output is safe for the consumer of the messages. IBM uses a post-processing engine (PPE) that performs XPath evaluation, schema validation, XML routing, and filtering in hardware (i.e., to reject dangerous XML). DataPower has achieved throughput (and schema validation) up to 2 Gbps with up to 64K simultaneous documents and 128K simultaneous XPath expressions with as little as 15W of power. The XG4 has three kinds of output: DOM-like tree for the SOAP header, a SAX-like stream for the SOAP body called TLA (sorry, it’s just another Three Letter Acronym to me ;-), and post-processed data (pass, fail, status). Their PPE approach enables application-specific optimizations and extensions for new standards. See their Submitted Paper (abstract only as of this blog).

Balisage 2009 Blog - Introduction

Welcome to the beginning of my blogs for Balisage Conference 2009 in beautiful centre-ville Montreal. Check back daily for highlights of this technical XML conference. For each formal presentation referenced in this blog, the keywords Submitted Paper will link to the relevant publication in the conference proceedings. According to the proceedings:

Balisage is a peer-reviewed conference designed to meet the needs of markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space) — in short, changing the world and the web through the power of markup.

See also the Extreme Markup Community site.

Photo: Hotel Europa, Second Floor Entrance to Conference (credit: Ken Sall, c'est moi)

Montreal Tomorrow

I should be packing. I should be going to sleep early. But instead I'm messing around with my Mac. Leaving at O'Dark Thirty for Montreal. Really looking forward to getting out of town and into a different culture. Here's hoping that Balisage Conference 2009 will be as good as it sounds!

XML is Just a Three-Letter Word

Well, although XML has been around officially for 11.5 years now, it is still a controversial subject. The XML Wikipedia article is undergoing a major re-write, led by Tim Bray and Michael Kay with a cast of thousands. Would you believe, a handful? Check out the huge XML Category on Wikipedia. A bunch of XML geeks including Yours Truly will be headed for Balisage Conference 2009 in Montreal next week.

McCartney Mania, Redux!

The more you look, the more you find! More links to satiate McCartney fans:

Washington Post review of the concert: He Hopes You Have Enjoyed the Show (Paul McCartney, Still a Performer Without Peer ).

Another review with photos: Click Click: Paul McCartney @ FedEx Field

Flickr photos from the McCartney FedEx concert (all rights reserved, sadly).

Plenty of YouTube videos, here and here.

Here's a major find: Lyrics to every McCartney, Wings, and Beatles song!

McCartney Mania!

On August 1, 2009, I was fortunate enough to see Paul McCartney up close (well, not that close) at FedEx Field in Landover, MD last night. What a fabulous Washington area show! This was only my second time(*) seeing Sir Paul, the first being in Oct. 2005. [Thanks to Donna W. and Bob M. respectively.]

The show kicked off soon after dark with a hard rockin' version of Drive My Car, the first of 22 Beatles songs. Naturally the 2.5 hour show included a small sampling of Wings tunes (Jet, Let Me Roll It, My Love, Mrs Vanderbilt [ho, hey ho], Band on the Run). There were a bunch post Wings performances (Only Mama Knows, Flaming Pie, Highway, Here Today, Dance Tonight, Calico Skies, Sing the Changes). Highway and Sing the Changes are from the recent Electric Arguments album by the The Firemen. With the exception of Dance Tonight and Here Today, this period is not the highpoint of Paul's career, IMHO. [Not everyone would agree with this statement, right, Frank M?]

Relatively early in the evening, Paul added a fan favorite not played in NYC, dedicated to our First Lady, Michelle. (Hey, Paul, ya gotta work on the pronunciation of "Barack" or he won't invite you to the White House.) This was soon followed by a dedication of Here Today to John about whom the song was written (from the Tug of War album from 1982). Later in the set, he dedicated Something to George, playing a ukulele that Harrison had given him.

When Paul introduced Blackbird, a solo from The Beatles (The White Album), he said it was written in response to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, a total surprise to yours truly. Turns out this is connected to Paul's book of poetry (song lyrics) called Blackbird Singing from 2002.

Both Frank M. and John T. noticed a bit of Jimi Hendrix, which turned out to be Foxey Lady, added as an instrumental portion to Let Me Roll It. Seems like they do this often judging for past set lists.

Another highpoint of the evening was the auditory and visual spectacular of fireworks during the #2 single Live and Let Die. While this is certainly nothing new to Paul's gigs, it is definitely impressive live, especially when you are relatively close to the stage. The sounds of exploding pyrotechnics and the acrid smell of smoke were quite powerful.

Understandably for someone who has a whopping 22 solo/Wings studio albums (plus a half dozen live albums and a number of other projects), there were lots of albums from which no songs at all were performed. Hard to believe though that there was nothing from the first McCartney album, my second favorite only to Band on the Run.

Maybe it is my personal bias, but as excited as people were about Paul's Wings and solo material, the loudest reaction seemed to be from Beatles tunes which constituted nearly 2/3 of the show. There were two high energy encores comprised entirely of Beatles songs (EC 1: Day Tripper, Lady Madonna, I Saw Her Standing There; EC 2: Yesterday (solo), Helter Skelter, Get Back, Sgt. Pepper's LHCB (repise), and The End). In fact, if you count the encores, the entire second half of the set list (songs 19 to 35) was nothing but Beatles classics! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Check out the complete Washington set list is available with lyrics and videos (various sources) for every one of the 35 songs. YouTube has a bunch of videos of varying quality from the FedEx show.

PS - The photo is from 2004 in Prague. Free to use according to Wikipedia.

And now for something completely different: Left 4 Dead - The Beatles. And you thought The Beatles Rock Band was going to be the best Beatles videogame?

(*) Never mind that I've seen 1964 The Tribute (Beatles tribute band) 10 times!