Hi,
  Below is a message from the PWS (Pluggable Web Server) mailing list.  Why might
this be interesting on this topic?  Well it turns out that a fair number of the pages 
in the downloadable .zip file are xml files, and, that a quick poke at the source turns
up what looks like an xml parser. 

cheers

bruce


Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 22:51:55 -0400
From: Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu>
Subject: [pws] What We're Doing with Minnow (Squeak Swiki)
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Cc: squeakers at cc.gatech.edu, pws at cc.gatech.edu

After poking and prodding Minnow in various ways this last week, we can't
figure out how the upload files are disappearing.  Going into the backups
didn't help to recover the lost files: The loss was more than a week ago
(we've searched back that far).  It gets more complicated to search farther
back, and we don't know when it happened.  Fortunately, we don't seem to
have lost any pages.

So here's our plan for what to do next.  There's not much we can do about
the lost files, but we can try to prevent it from happening again.

We've been working on a new architecture for PWS and Swiki.  (As Ralph
Johnson pointed out in an earlier post: You can't know how badly you've
factored something until you live with it for awhile.  PWS is two years old
November, so we know pretty well now just how bad the first cut was :-)
Bolot Kerimbaev has developed a new webserver architecture in Squeak, which
he's named "Comanche."  In all the tests that we've run so far, Comanche is
faster with fewer errors than PWS.  Jochen "Je77/Jeff" Rick has written a
new Swiki for Comanche (which he's just calling "Swiki," but we've been
referring to as "ComSwiki" to make a distinction.).  The Comanche Swiki has
lots of cool new features, some based on things we learned from WikiWorks.
(Je77's research direction right now is to develop his Swiki as an
audio-based personal notation device to sit on wearable, so the underlying
architecture is flexible and powerful because he plans to take off with it
in an interesting direction.)  If you'd like to try out ComSwiki (and
download the latest Beta of both ComSwiki and Comanche), you're welcome to
visit http://seaweed.cc.gatech.edu:8080/docs

On Monday, we're going to move Minnow to Comanche.  We won't be switching
from Swiki to ComSwiki yet -- we don't yet have a conversion process. Bolot
has written a PWS-compatibility module so that we can continue to run the
older Swikis.  He's changing one part of Minnow's upload code: To use the
Comanche upload facility which has been standing up to all of the beating
on it that we could invent.

This means that:
- Monday, Minnow may be hard to access, depending on where Bolot is in his
process.
- After that, we will hopefully find Minnow more responsive and handle
uploads MUCH better.
- When we have a conversion process, the transition should be easier since
Minnow will already be running Comanche

Again, our apologies for the screw-up in the Minnow UploadSwiki, and we're
working hard to avoid that happening again.
  Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
David Cramer <dacramer at videon.wave.ca> wrote:
> I just got back from XML World. A few programming/scripting languages are
> commonly being used for parsing/processing XML. Smalltalk was not
> mentioned. I mentioned it one day, to subtle ridicule.
> 
> Java is the highest profile language being recommended, actually raved
> about, in this application. One of the presenters with one of the most
> extensive
> backgrounds in object technology I've ever seen repeatedly mentioned Java in
> his presentation. When I asked him in private about Smalltalk, he readily
> agreed that Smalltalk would be much better in a lot of ways for this stuff;
> and that maybe in a couple years more people would realize it, too.
> 
> It would be nice if a few Squeakers were interested in working on building
> in as
> much support as possible for the processing of markup languages. It's
> pretty clear that despite the general ignorance, confusion, and hype about
> what markup languages provide in the context of data exchange and
> presentation, the XML wave is big and getting bigger. If Java takes over
> this field by default, Smalltalk (and Squeak) will have a bigger task by a
> factor of 1000 than it had before, and it didn't seem to be doing so hot
> before!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> David Cramer
> 
> --
> David Cramer, Process Innovation Evangelist     87-1313 Border Street
> PBSC Computer Training Centres (an IBM company) Winnipeg MB R3H 0X4
> Corporate Office Research & Development         Canada
> 
> David Cramer, Process Innovation Evangelist          87-1313 Border Street
> PBSC Computer Training Centres (an IBM company)      Winnipeg MB R3H 0X4
> Corporate Office Research & Development              Canada