While I could go on and on about how fault tolerant our infrastructure is, and how we go to the n-th degree to make sure that the service is always up and running, there's no getting away from the fact that there is a certain level of risk in leveraging functions on remote servers. Which is why not everything should be a Web Service. I have 3 general rules of thumb when it comes to determining if a function is useful as a web service. It should either 1) have access to properitary data which is not available or not easily available locally, 2) it is very difficult and complex to deploy locally, or 3) it requires significantly more processing power than may be available locally. Following these guidelines you could easily disqualify something like a square root web service, as 1) no proprietery data is necessary to calculate a square root, 2) it is not complex to deploy a local function to do this, and 3) it does not require a lot of processing power. The process of transforming Word documents to XML is a processor intensive one, and a delicate one, which we had to wrap with a stability architecture which is not easy to deploy locally, which make it a good candidate to be provided as a Web Service.
Also remember that Web Services were designed to be executed in a globally distributed fashion. If you are going to deploy all of your Web Services in your local infrastructure, then they serve little benefit by being Web Services at all, and might as well be a local DLL functions. Regards, Doug Kerwin http://www.metaverse.cc ----- Original Message ----- From: "Oddur Sn�r Magn�sson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 3:32 PM Subject: RE: [cms-list] WYSIWYG Editor suggestions I think using a web service on a 3rdparty server would not be a good idea, what if that server goes down ? Me� Bestu Kve�ju / Best Regards ----------------------------------- > > Oddur Sn�r Magn�sson > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > +354 822-0134 > work : http://www.disill.is > personal : http://2k.01.is > ----------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Douglas Kerwin Sent: 4. desember 2002 19:45 To: michael kimsal; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [cms-list] WYSIWYG Editor suggestions The XFormWebService transforms entire Word documents to XML. So if you have a Word document which has a simple heading, a sentence and a bulleted, list, that document would be transformed into XML as follows: <?xml version="1.0"?> <Doc> <Title><Bold><Font RelSize="+2">My Heading</Font></Bold></Title> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left" Empty="Y"></Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left">This is my test paragraph. How about <Underline>underline</Underline>, <Italics>italics</Italics>, and <Bold>bold</Bold>?</Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left" Empty="Y"></Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left">This is a bulleted list</Para> <List> <Item>My first bullet</Item> <Item>And the second bullet</Item> <Item>Last bullet</Item> </List> </Doc> Then when applying the XSL style-sheet, it becomes the following HTML fragment: <span class="content-heading">My Heading</span> <br clear="all"> <p class="content-text" align="left"> </p> <p class="content-text" align="left">This is my test paragraph. How about <u>underline</u>, <i>italics</i>, and <b>bold</b>?</p> <p class="content-text" align="left"> </p> <p class="content-text" align="left">This is a bulleted list</p> <ul style="margin-top:.0001pt;margin-bottom:.0001pt"> <li class="content-text">My first bullet</li> <li class="content-text">And the second bullet</li> <li class="content-text">Last bullet</li> </ul> It doesn't rely on Word's "Save as HTML" feature, as that does create some terrible HTML, and doesn't give the opportunity to transform into other formats such as wireless, as you have the freedom todo when starting with XML format. It doesn't have to be the entire page. Often it is only the body of the page. The website header and navigation are not part of the Word document, but are the framework for the site. Microsoft Word is the most widely used document/content authoring application in existance. I rarely run into anyone who does not have Word installed on their system, so most people won't have to upgrade to anything. But even for those who don't have Word and just want to edit a phone number on a web page, as you say, can use Word Pad, that comes with Windows, which saves to Rich Text Format (RTF), which the XFormWebService can also process in the same way it does a Word Document. There's no sense in trying to beat Word as an authoring tool. I've seen a lot of WYSIWYG authoring tools, and they all fall short. Why go through the trouble to duplicate all of that functionality, add spell check, add grammar check, add all of the convenient features that hundreds of programmers at Microsoft have spent years introducing into the software, when you can just use Word and still get what you are after - well formed HTML, which can only come from XML, not Word's built in Save as HTML option. Regards, Doug ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael kimsal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Douglas Kerwin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 1:37 PM Subject: Re: [cms-list] WYSIWYG Editor suggestions > DOes your service deal with 'snippets' of HTML? > > This is what most people are looking for in a visual editor - the > ability for someone to visually edit portions of an HTML document, not > the full thing. > > The realobjects solution mentioned before didn't seem to be able to that > last I looked - it would treat everything as a full *ML document, adding > in opening and closing tags where they weren't wanted. > (body/head/html/etc). > > I'm not a big MS fan, but they've certainly given people a nice tool > with that built-in HTML editing component. Yes, the code it generates > isn't very good, but *no one* seems to have come up with a better answer > which *just works*. :( Sorry Mac people - (according to a recent Wired > story, most of you hate MS with a passion anyway!) - you're stuck > without a good embeddable HTML editing component. > > By requiring everyone to have MSWord on their system, you're most likely > dictating some upgrade costs as well which shouldn't be necessary for > people who just want to update a phone number on a page. > > n Wed, 2002-12-04 at 12:48, Douglas Kerwin wrote: > > Why not just use Microsoft Word as your WYSIWYG editor? Metaverse offers a > > Web Service to convert a Word document to XML format, then gives an XML > > Stylehsheet (XSL) to transform the XML into HTML. > > > > The web service is at; > > > > http://xform.metaverse.cc/xformservice.asmx > > > > www.metaverse.cc for more information. > > -- > Michael Kimsal > http://www.logicreate.com > 734-480-9961 > > -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma. -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma. -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
