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In mid-July, several mainstream companies, including Macromedia and Salon, set up Web logs (known as blogs) on portions of their Web sites. Scott Rosenberg of Salon cited "the community of Salon-based bloggers, which will help you get the word out and bring visitors to read what you write." Rosenberg tracks the Salon blogs, providing links and pointers to the most interesting bloggers and posts.
Behind the scenes, Web sites use XML-RPC technology to link their blogs together. The XML-RPC language provides inexpensive toolsets that make blogging as easy as creating a Word document. Most blogging software can be modified to create a basic Content Management System (CMS). This useful role has enticed scores of smaller companies at the low-end of the CMS market towards using blogs as part of their on-line presence.
Blogs resemble personal Web pages, with a greater range of technical sophistication. Owners use a simple page editor and their comments are published to their Web space by a file transfer program that works behind the scenes. Dave Winer from Radio Userland provided the technical infrastructure for Salon. Winer has programmed and promoted Web logs since 1994 and has played a leading role in articulating several programming specifications.
It's easy to set up blogging software because it uses the XML-RPC standard. But purist programmers despise that protocol, because it means moving towards a proprietary Web. Several of the blogging programs modify accepted standards, replacing them with "short-sighted protocols," in the opinion of Jon Hanna, programmer at Spin Solutions in Dublin.
Derek Lawless, e-business architect at Ionet, wouldn't agree. "XML-RPC has many advantages over Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)." Java programmer Anthony Geogehan cited "asynchronous interaction" as one of those advantages.
While Hanna recognised that XML-RPC has many advantages of SOAP, "the implementation is poor and short-sighted," he said.
"If you want to pass human-readable strings in any language other than English, you have to break the spec, and cross your fingers and hope the other end of the communication breaks the spec in the same way," he said. "Otherwise you have to base64 encode it." Hanna considers this to be short-sighted, "given that you are then probably going to encode the actual XML in UTF-8 anyway."
"XML-RPC does have the advantage of being substantially more lightweight and easier to implement than SOAP," said Lawless. "Dave Winer helped with the design of SOAP. It was designed to be a more flexible, and as a result, more complex protocol.
"XML-RPC is a /lightweight/ protocol. If you want a simple method of RPCalling then it may suit you. If you need a larger feature set, use SOAP."
As they embrace and use blogging software, some Irish developers acknowledge that the CMS industry have over-built their content management models. Three years ago Brian Greene, technical director at Doop Design, coded his Newsvendor publishing program, which he said could effectively meet the needs of SMEs seeking a dynamic newsfeed for their sites. After coding for less than one day, programmers could upload and modify the Open Source files of Greene's program. At the same time, several Irish vendors were selling CMS programs costing more than EUR40,000. Each implementation served different client requirements.
When a company sets up a Weblog instead of a CMS, it's often because they know CMS solutions do not work the way they should. Forrester Research examined a dozen commercial CMSs. In early 2001 Forrester's winner, Open Market Content Server, scored a mere 3.0 out of five. Forrester's report entitled Managing Content Hypergrowth concluded CMS offerings were "immature," that none adequately addressed all needs, and that the vendors all had very different visions of how the CMS will evolve. It also warned that organisations that have bought CMSs are going to run into problems maintaining and customising them. "Owner satisfaction will be short-lived," Forrester concluded bitingly.
Disillusionment at the high end leads to point and click designs at the low end. There is minimal consulting required to set up a personal Weblog. Consequently, the Weblog market is growing as much as 25 percent a month.
This wildfire growth has infected the low end of the content management space. Up until now, it's been very difficult for the average HTML designer to configure a CMS. But now, most designers can start a weblog with just a few clicks and then quickly configure them to detailed specifications.
This is a big deal, as there are many more designers than programmers. Consultant configuration that used to be done by expensive (and rare) programmers can now be done by cheap (and much more common) designers.
Most blogware packages now support multiple databases, multiple templates, multiple users, future posting, category support and data syndication. Only a thin layer of functionality separates blogware from low-end content management solutions.
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