Differences Between RSS and ATOM

There are several differences between the RSS and ATOM standards, namely their:

• Content Models: RSS may contain either plain text or escaped HTML as a payload, with no way to indicate which of the two is provided. Atom, on the other hand, provides a mechanism to explicitly label the type of content being provided by the entry, and allows for a broad variety of payload types including plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, Base64-encoded binary, and references to external content such as documents, video and audio streams.

• Data Formats:The RSS specification relies on the use of RFC 822 formatted timestamps to communicate information about when items in the feed were created and last updated. The Atom working group chose instead to use timestamps formatted according to the rules specified by RFC 3339.
  
  
• Internationalisation: While the RSS vocabulary has a mechanism to indicate a language for the feed, there is no means by which a language for individual items or text elements can be specified. Atom, on the other hand, uses the standardized xml:lang attribute to make it possible to specify a language context for every piece of human readable content in the feed. Atom also differs from RSS in that it supports the use of links to resources and unique identifiers to contain characters outside the US ASCII character set.

• Modularity: The elements of the RSS vocabulary are not generally reusable in other XML vocabularies. The Atom syntax was specifically designed to allow elements to be reused outside the context of an Atom feed document. For instance, it is not uncommon to find atom:link elements being used within RSS feeds.

jQuery

Week two’s research topic was the jQuery Javascript library.

Its strengths are that it is fast and concise and has to ability to simplify HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. It has a lightweight footprint (typically 15kb in size), is cross-browser and is CSS3 compliant.

jQuery was designed to change the way that we write web applications by emphasising the interaction between Javascript and HTML. A notable site to mention is: http://jquery.com/.  It contains information about what jQuery is, tutorials on how to use it, how it interacts with other libraries and all the jQuery documentation.

Other JavaScript libraries out there are Prototype and script.aculo.us, as well as JavaScript widget libraries such as Ext and Dojo Toolkit.  Companies and groups such as Microsoft and Yahoo! have also developed their own JavaScript-based user interface libraries, which find their way into the web applications developed by these companies.

Twitter

Tried out Twitter the other day, you can find me here: http://twitter.com/Spider_webb.

Feels like a mini version of MySpace, lol… not that I have one. Still searching for an interesting picture to put in my profile.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook.

Distributed Systems

Week one’s research topic was distributed systems, here is a bit about them:

Distributed Systems are hardware and software systems containing more than one processing or storage element, concurrent processes, or multiple programs.

This is useful in situations where a very large computational problem needs to be solved and resources, such as supercomputers, are not as easily available.  With DS, a task may be split up into smaller chunks of data and performed and processed by the many computers owned via the general public.  Examples of some such projects are BOINC (open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing) and SETI@HOME (searching for extraterrestrial intelligence).

These systems also incorporate concepts to design programs to run on many processing cores as multi-core systems become more widely used.

More information can be found within this wiki.

Installing IIS

I installed an IIS server on my virtual machine by the use of the add/remove windows components.

Whilst checking the web server service to be installed, a number of other services were set to be installed as well. Windows prompted me twice for the location of the install disk, which i had to change from D:\ drive to C:\.

After the installation was complete I was able to go into Firefox browsing localhost to connect to the web server, however could not browse to it in Internet Explorer. I was able to put a simple html page into the C:\InetPub\wwwroot\ folder named test.htm and navigate to localhost/test.htm in order to view it.

The only web server I have previous experience with is Apache, so it will be interesting to learn some other ones too.

My Previous Web Experience

Some of the things I have learnt in the past:

- Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, HTML/CSS

- Perl, CGI

- PHP (Only a bit)

- Database: Oracle, MySQL.

Most of these were learnt throughout the Web Applications, Database Management and Modular Programming subjects here at Bond. My most favourite project would probably be the second Web Applications assignment where we had to create a website with flash, java applets and several other things embedded into it.