Re: Banging the identity drum again, this time REST-style

On 26/11/10 08:35, Are Gulbrandsen wrote:
> Hi
>
> On 24. nov. 2010, at 02.21, Murray Altheim wrote:
>> One of the things missing in a lot of communities is an open
>> source reference implementation of the primary specifications.
>> We almost had that with tm4j and perhaps are approaching that
>> with Ontopia (though that is a commercial product).
>
> Why the comment "(though that is a commercial product)"?
>
> It's not a commercial product. It was, but has been Open Sourced,
> - and that is a strength in my opinion. It has proven itself in
> some very serious real world applications. Ontopia have active
> committers in at least 4 different European countries.

Hi Are,

I'm by no means being critical of Ontopia for having released
their product into open source, indeed, it's probably the most
significant boon to the Topic Maps community to have happened
in years and I'm hoping in an upcoming project to be able to
actively use the software. So please don't take that remark as
a criticism, just a statement of fact: it is still a commercial
product, its IP is still owned by Ontopia (i.e., Bouvet), and
its code has been released under an Apache license. Though I
don't see the code anywhere as part of the distribution (what's
up with that?)

> In what way is Ontopia a lesser candidate than tm4j was. I
> know that you had a special relationship with tm4j (and I
> respect that), but I evaluated it and never found it ready
> for a real application. My opinion is that Ontopia as a
> tool always has been far beyond what tm4j ever was.

TM4J's team was only a few very busy people. I'd written my
own engine but stopped using it when Kal's became available. He's
a much better programmer than I am and it was pointless to compete.
I played a very minor role in its development; it was Kal's baby.
As for its usefulness, I used it in my Ceryle application with no
issues for many years -- it worked fine. TM4J is limited to XTM
1.0 as that's when it was written.

But comparing TM4J to Ontopia is a bit apples and oranges. The
latter had very significant resources put into it and an entire
business built around it.

My point about reference implementations is that being a commercial
product Ontopia's goals are not minimalism, nor documentation-wise
does it make explicit references to the spec. A reference implementation
implements *only* the specification it references. If there was some
way of extracting a core of the Ontopia engine that implemented
to the letter one or more of the Topic Map specifications, great. But
it'd be better to have one implementation per specification. When
you compare that to say, nsgmls (James Clark's ref impl. of an SGML
parser), that's what we really need. Though some would beg to differ,
I'm sure (as is the case generally in this community of contrarians).

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

       Boundless wind and moon - the eye within eyes,
       Inexhaustible heaven and earth - the light beyond light,
       The willow dark, the flower bright - ten thousand houses,
       Knock at any door - there's one who will respond.
                                       -- The Blue Cliff Record

-- 

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

       Boundless wind and moon - the eye within eyes,
       Inexhaustible heaven and earth - the light beyond light,
       The willow dark, the flower bright - ten thousand houses,
       Knock at any door - there's one who will respond.
                                       -- The Blue Cliff Record