Joe Lennon

In the third and final part of this series on creating applications that interact with an IBM DB2 pureXML database, you will use the popular PHP language to create scripts for publishing and syndicating the status updates in your database across the Web.

First you will allow users to create a Profile Badge in HTML, which permits them to generate a piece of HTML code to paste into their blog or Web site. This will pull the latest status updates from the pureXML database and present them in a pre-defined format. Users will be able to customize the design of the badge, choosing from a selection of sizes and color schemes, and define the number of updates to be displayed. Next, you will create a PHP script to publish the latest status updates in the database as an RSS Feed. Finally, you will create a script that presents all of the status updates in the database to the users with a Post to Twitter button alongside each update. When a user presses this button, the Twitter API will take the specified post and add the update to the Twitter stream of that user.

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe® Flex® applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter. In Part 1 of the series, you learned about Web Services and how they are enabled using DB2 pureXML as you created the microblog database and tested it. Part 2 tapped into Adobe Flex and ActionScript to create the user interface of your application. In this article, the final part of the series, you will learn how to use your pureXML Web Services to publish your microblog entries to an HTML page.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog3/

In Part 2 of my developerWorks article series on creating a microblogging service, I show you how to connect to the Web services created in Part 1 from a Flex application. This application allows you to post new updates to your microblog database and see a list of previous updates.

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe® Flex® applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter. In Part 1 of the series, you learned about Web Services and how they are enabled using DB2 pureXML as you created the microblog database and tested it. In this article, Part 2 of the series, you will tap into Adobe Flex and ActionScript® to create the user interface of the application.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog2/

In the first part of this three-part series on IBM DB2 pureXML, I show you how to get started with pureXML on a DB2 Express-C 9.5 database. You learn how to create and insert XML data into a relational table, and how to query that data using SQL, SQL/XML and XQuery. Next, you learn how to expose this data to applications using Web Services in IBM Data Studio. You create a database procedure that will insert data into the database, and this is also exposed as a Web Service. In Parts 2 and 3 you will learn how to take all of this and harness it in your applications, first in an Adobe Flex application for posting status updates, and then publishing profile badges an RSS feeds using PHP. You will also learn how to push your updates to Twitter using the Twitter API.

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe Flex applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog1/index.html

GrabMyTable is a new website that aims to provide visitors with access to customer reviews for restaurants across Dublin. It is elegantly designed and very simplistic in terms of what it displays to the visitor. Finding restaurants can be quite tedious however, unless you know the name of the restaurant you are looking for. You cannot browse by cuisine, for example, or find restaurants in a certain price range. Worst of all, you can’t see restaurants by area or location. Although I understand the minimalist approach the site owners are trying to take, it’s almost a bit too minimalist to be all that useful. There is no way of booking a table and there is no rewards scheme, like the one offered at rival site Menupages.ie. The nail in the coffin for me is that the site only lists Dublin restaurants.

Pros:

• Elegant Design
• Quick Sign Up
• Lots of Restaurants
• No ads

Cons:

• Dublin only
• Lack of Information (Opening Hours, Website, Facilities)
• Poor Navigation
• No bookings or rewards scheme

Score: 6/10

Visit GrabMyTable

I recently posted a short blog entry about my forthcoming book on CouchDB. A lot of you have been asking me for more information about the book, so I decided to put together a page with much more detail about it. The book is titled “Beginning CouchDB” and is going to be published in December 2009 by Apress Publishing. The printed version of the book will sell for a RRP of $34.99 in the United States, with the e-Book selling for $24.49. It will be roughly 300 pages in length, spread over thirteen chapters and 2-3 appendices. Its target audience will be people who have very little or no experience with Apache CouchDB, and will guide readers through getting the software installed on their computer, creating their first database, managing the database, using the tools that come with CouchDB and other basic topics. It will also explore some of the more advanced areas of CouchDB, such as Map/Reduce, the JavaScript View engine, replication and scaling a CouchDB deployment. The book’s cover image is shown below. I will post a larger image as soon as I get it!

As for how the book is coming along, it’s going very well! I’m not a full-time writer so all of my writing is done in the evenings or over weekends. I’m learning things I never knew about Couch all the time, and with each passing day I grow fonder and fonder of this excellent database server. The book’s page is up on Apress.com at the following URL: http://apress.com/book/view/9781430272373. This page can also be found through a CouchDB.org link - http://books.couchdb.org/beginning – thanks to @CouchDB on Twitter! It’s not currently available for Pre-Order but it should be in the not too distant future. It should also become available on Amazon.com soon.

I’m currently working with the guys in Apress to get the book into their “Alpha Program”, which allows you to purchase the e-Book now and get access to each draft chapter as it becomes available. When the book is complete you will of course get access to the finished work as an e-Book. Purchasing the book through the Alpha Program will likely cost $24.49.