Topic Maps and .Net

Take a look at An Introduction to Topic Maps on msdn. It's written by Kal Ahmed and Graham Moore of Networked Planet. It's more informative and more up-to-date than the introduction on my website :-(

Kal Ahmed has been heavily involved in TM4j, an open source implementation of the Topic Map API. Graham and he have now created a (commercial) TMCore topic map engine for .NET

I've been playing with Topic Maps for a while now. Topic Mapping has incredible potential as a technique for knowledge creation and dissemination, but uptake has been slow. Let's hope that interest from the Microsoft developer community will be the trigger for liftoff.

MindJet, .Net and the Mac

I'm not given to conspiracy theory, but I know that well-known companies sometimes have big secrets. Like me, you probably like to guess those secrets, and sometimes get them right.

You're about to read my latest wild guess.

First, though, I need to set the scene. For years I've used a program called MindManager to create Mind Maps on my computer. (Thanks to Rachel Davies for the latter link). Mind Manager is not the only Mind Mapping Software, but it's probably the most widely used. It's well integrated with Windows, but is currently only available on that platform.

A few days ago a message on the MindManager Yahoo Group mentioned that MindJet, the makers of MindManager, were recruiting developers with Mac experience.

I can only see two plausible explanations for this,and one of them is mindblowing.

The boring one is that MindJet are really worried about NovaMind, which is a Mind Mapping program that runs on the Mac and will soon be available for Windows. The folks at MindJet might be willing to create a second codebase for their product, but I doubt it. I don't think they are that dumb.

The second explanation is that they know something that we don't. That's not unlikely, as MindJet have a very close relationship with Microsoft.

When the Mac makes its move to Intel hardware, is it possible that we'll also see .Net for the Mac OS?

It's not XML - it's not YAML - it's SPaML!

I'm currently working on a project that requires a lot of XSLT 2.0 transformations. Since I'm doing Test Driven Development, I am relying heavily on XMLUnit. (Bless you, Tim and Jeff).

However, I've been spending more time than I want to writing XML test documents.

So I created SPaML - the Simplest Possible Markup Language. It's very concise, and allows me to specify a complex document in a short line of text.

Here's a SPaML document (quoted, as it would be in a JUnit TestCase):

"(map file=foo(branch id=0(branch id=1(text{bar}))(branch id=2)))"

The corresponding XML is about three times as long, with escaped quotes. Horrid to read, tedious to write, and very error prone. Don't you just love it when you've got bugs in your test data!

I've written a SPaML converter in Java, and will probably port it to C#.
If anyone is interested, drop me a note: romilly(at)cocking.co.uk

Competitive Engineering hits the bookshops!

Tom Gilb skyped me this morning to tell me that his latest book "Competitive Engineering" has hit the bookshops.

There's a (five star) review on Amazon.co.uk; you can view my (five star) review on Amazon.com.

New SmartArrays website

SmartArrays, Inc. have just finished a remake of their website. There's a lot of new information there, including a new interactive tutorial.

eXtremely enjoyable Tuesday

One of the things I'll miss most if I ever move out of London is the Extreme Tuesday Club.

It's a goup of great people who get together when they can (on Tuesdays, as you might have guessed) at the Old Bank Of England pub in Fleet Street.

If you're a regular you can be sure of meeting old friends and making new ones. If you're a first-timer you can be sure of a warm welcome. Everyone seems to share a thirst for learning and a love of sharing what they already know. The regulars include some very experienced developers.

It's a great way to find out what's going on in the Agile community. Last night Peter Brown announced XPDay5 - a two day international conference about Agile Software Development for software developers, project leaders, IT managers, testers, architects, and coaches.

I went to XPDay4 last year and loved it. This year XPDay5 will take place on Monday 28th & Tuesday 29th November, 2005 in London, U.K. Recommended!

Fun with XSLT - no, really!

I've been having a lot of fun with XSLT recently.


I'm currently working on a customised course for a banking client. (No, not the French one). Over the last couple of years I have been gradually refining a course publishing framework that takes a MindMap and turns it into courseware. The framework works pretty well, but I still need to create lots of graphics.

Trouble is, I hate using drawing editors.

I'd much rather just describe the picture that I want in text and then have a piece of software draw the diagrams for me. Fortunately there are several Open Source tools that can help; one of my favorites is dot (part of the GraphViz package) . Dot reads a text file that describes a directed or undirected graph in the dot language and then lays out the graph for you. It can export a variaty of formats, inclding svg which is what my framework prefers.

The dot language is pretty intuitive, but it's a bit repetitive if you are creating lots of similar diagrams. Since I hate un-necessary repetition, I decided to create a little language for some of the most common diagrams that I needed.

Problem: how should I turn my little language into a dot file? Normally I would use a compiler compiler to do this - fun, but not quite trivial. A few days ago I stumbled on an article by Michael Kay which showed how to use regular expressions and the new unparsed-text capabilities of XSLT 2.0 to turn text files into XML. It's then very easy to get XSLT to generate a new text file in dot format.

Here's a short sample input file:

data xml "XML\ndocument"
text txt "Unparsed text\ndocument"
data out "XML, HTML or text\ndocument"
program xsl "XSL\nStylesheet"
process XSLT "XSLT 2.0\nProcessor"
input from xml to XSLT
unparsed from txt to XSLT
code from xsl to XSLT
output from XSLT to out

Here's the dot language file that's generated:

digraph process{
node[shape=Mrecord]
xml[label="XML\ndocument" shape=box]
txt[label="Unparsed text\ndocument" shape=box color=brown]
out[label="XML, HTML or text\ndocument" shape=box]
xsl[label="XSL\nStylesheet" shape=invhouse]
XSLT[label="{{XSLT|ANT task}|XSLT 2.0\nProcessor}" ]
xml -> XSLT
txt -> XSLT[color=brown]
xsl -> XSLT[color=gray]
XSLT -> out
{ rank=same; txt; xsl; }
{ rank=same; xml; out; XSLT; }
}

And here's the output as a jpeg image: