But with browser forms, input and output are tightly intermingled. The View takes care of input and output. Something else has primary responsibility for mediating the data flow to and from the model–and that something has been called a Presenter. This yields the MVP pattern.

The terminology gets confusing quickly, but roughly

XForms Instance == MVP Model

XForms Model == MVP Presenter

XForms User Interface == MVP View

It’s not wrong to associate XForms with MVC–the term has become so blurry that it’s easy to lump variants like MVP into the same bucket. But to the extent that it makes sense to talk about more specific patterns, maybe we should be calling the XForms design pattern MVP instead of MVC. Comments? Criticism? Fire away below. -m

Photo by Micah

I know he left many things undone, for example only enhancing 60% of the delivered result pages. He never got a chance to finish his life’s ambition of promoting RDFa and microformats to the masses or to be the killer app of the (lower-case) semantic web. You could say he will live on as “some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform”. Part of the monkey we loved will live on as enhanced results continue to flow forth from the Yahoo/Bing alliance.

The SearchMonkey Alumni group on LinkedIn is filled with wonderful mourners. Micah Alpern wrote there

I miss the team, the songs, and the aspiration to solve a hard problem. Everything else is just code.

Isaac Asimov was reported to have said “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” Today we can identify with that sentiment. Keep typing.

-m

Best of all, perhaps, is the word “scientometrics”.

Late that night, with 15 minutes of battery remaining, I found it. The operative search term is XSLTJSON. -m

Some interesting tidbits overheard, in no particular order…

“it is not necessarily clear that this approach would capture the difference between the ridiculous and the merely implausible.”

Complexity — what is the relationship betwen complexity and long-term data storage?

“Narratives with fancy words in them”

How do you store, say, a video in a format that will be readable in 100 years?

Order of magnitude scale changes produce discontinuities

“The Da Vinci Schema”

Dandelion DNA (Free license)

“Indispensible” — “I don’t think that means what you think it does”

“Keeping electrons alive is really difficult”

“I wondered…with my Topic Map brain damage…”

-m

Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010 2:00 – 4:00 pm

MoreFlavor 991 N. San Antonio Road

Los Altos, CA 94022

We will taste some meads, focusing on sensory evaluation, then walk through the steps of brewing up a batch. As usual, seating is limited, so email me to reserve a spot. To help the brew shop recover the costs of the honey, yeast, and light snacks available, a $10 donation will help make sure these events can continue.

On a personal note, I’ll be traveling back from a conference in Montreal the day before, so I might be a little jet lagged. Could get interesting. :-) -m

Class size is limited, so I’ve been actively psyching myself down for the last month, not getting my hopes up too high. Then when the acceptance came, I had computer down time, and nearly exploded from holding the news in for 3 days. :-)

Ahhhh. I should say more, but I believe I may still be in shock. -m

P. S. OK, how about 25 great opening lines.

Changing to a new hard drive is the digital equivalent of moving. Disruptive to your routine, and you’re living out of boxes for months afterward. Not much fun, but also an opportunity to reorganize a few things, to start fresh. -m

• Selenium IDE lets you record tests in a number of languages, but only HTML ones can be played back. For someone using only Selenium IDE, it’s a confusing array of choices for no apparent reason.
• Selenium RC has bindings for lots of different languages but not for the HTML tests that are most useful in Selenium IDE. (Why not include the ability to simply play through an entire recorded script in one call, instead of fine grained commands like selenium.key_press(input_id, 110), etc.?)
• The list of projects prominently mentions Selenium Core (a JavaScript implementation), but when you click through to the documentation, it’s not mentioned. Elsewhere on the site it’s spoken of in deprecating terms.
• If you look at the developer wiki, all the recent attention is on Web Drivers, a new architecture for remote-controlling browsers, but those aren’t mentioned in the docs (yet) either.

So yeah, right now it’s awkward and confusing. The underlying architecture of the project is undergoing a tectonic shift, something that would never see public light of day in a proprietary project. In the end it will come out leaner and meaner. What the project needs in the short term is more help from fresh outsiders who can visualize the desirable end state and help the ramped and productive developers on the project get there.

By the way, if this kind of problem seems interesting to you, let me know. We’re hiring. If you have any tips for getting up to speed in Selenium, comment below.

-m

BEVERAGE SERVICE must include a thoughtful assortment of meads and bendy straws.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Bendy straws must be strong enough to be able to be used as blowguns.  ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT NOTE: Local paramedic aid may be required.

Read the rest, it’s great. -m

So back into the carboy it goes, with a fresh dose of fining agents. What’s a few more months at this point? -m