some notes

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

Here are some random notes relating to my current work on EDUML:

1. I finally got gnumeric to work without crashing (latest version 0.7-1.1)
   and it is a beauty... it is a masterpiece.

It saves directly in XML format using namespaces so that it looks like it 
will integrate beautifully with EDUML the trick is to not be fooled by the 
apparent binary nature of the saved files; gnumeric automatically gzips the 
XML file (I got caught :-)

2. PHP3 now includes XML functions (DOM) which makes it a very stable language
   for the web version of EDUML.  Furthermore, I think PHP3 is far easier to
   wrap my brain around that CGI-BIN.  The documentation for PHP3 is 
   particularly well done (using DOCBOOK SGML) and I will field test the idea 
   of using my students to write PHP3 scripts for EDUML because I think it is 
   well within their reach.

For those who have not heard of PHP3, it is a web programming language which 
looks and feel like java and perl but somehow looks and feel simpler than 
either.  It is used on 150,000  websites around the world.  It requires APACHE 
with PHP3 module configured on.  To use it, simply create a web page with a
.php3  instead of .html extension.  Then write in normal HTML except when you 
want to do some PHP3 programming, or shell calls to the server or whatever, 
just add the following processing instruction as a tag element:

<?php  code snippet goes here ?>

3. NOSQL is a package for doing relational database manipulations without SQL 
(hence the name) ... it is completely text based and also very easy to wrap 
one's mind around.  I've been using it for 4-5 years to manage my educational 
data (and still do).  It is 100% unix philosophy; a bunch of small programs 
that perform one task well and which can be piped and redirected to each other 
and to other unix tools at will.

  http://www.mi.linux.it/nosql/

Anyways, there is much debate among the XML crowd as to whether to aim for
pure 100% XML or a mixture of RDB (relational Database) and XML.
Oracle for example is becoming such a mixture.  So I've been toying with the
idea of using NOSQL to store XML snippets thus benefitting from the best of 
both worlds.  The same would apply for postgres95 (the free source binary rdb) 
or any of the commercial rdb our schools use.

End of my random thoughts,

Bruno