Wednesday, August 14, 2013

DB2-RDF

I still think this is really cool. NoSQL Graph support for DB2-RDF holds a lot of promise, particularly if it performs as well with large data sets as people are suggesting it does.

Summary:
1.  DB2-RDF support is officially called "NoSQL Graph Support". 
2.  The API extends the Jena API (Graph layer).  Developers familiar with Jena TDB will have the Model layer capabilities they are accustomed to.
3.  Although the DB2-RDF functionality is being released with DB2 LUW 10.1, it is also compatible with DB2 9.7.
4.  Full supports for SPARQL 1.0 and a subset of SPARQL 1.1.  Full SPARQL 1.1 support (which is still a W3C working draft) will be forthcoming.
5.  While RDBMS implementations of RDF graphs have typically been non-performant, that is not the case here*.  Some very impressive and innovative work has been put into optimization capabilities.  Out-of-the box performance is comparable with native triple stores, and read/write performance in the optimized schema has been seen to surpass these speeds.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Angular Saxon Summer Update

My side project over the summer started with a premise: using Saxon-CE, the client-side port of the popular Saxon library, on a Firefox OS device. It didn't work on the Simulator, and I worked on some different Mobile Health work on PhoneGap and Android, and then one day, Saxon-CE just started working under both PhoneGap and Firefox OS. A new Simulator had come out, and the stars had aligned.

Firefox OS provides native support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) using XMLHttpResponse (XHR), as well as native support for JSON. I knew that I wanted to use XML, but I was finding JSON useful as well. About this time, I became involved with the Prescription Medication Information Exchange (PMIX) demo, which is part of David Webber's Open-XDX project, which is an extension of OASIS CAM. And it supports both JSON and XML endpoints. I had also been working with HL7 FHIR, which also supports REST, JSON and XML.

So at that point, I had a rudimentary XSLT view which ran as an application on Firefox OS, backed by Open-XDX. Not very useful, considering that Firefox OS devices had not at this point begun shipping commercially (they still haven't). So I turned my focus back to PhoneGap for Android. Without native support for CORS XHR, I needed JQuery and Backbone, and I started down that path; however, this didn't allow me to share code between PhoneGap and Firefox OS, since JQuery and Backbone were over-powered for what I wanted to accomplish.

Then I watched the AngularJS demo video. I had worked with Thymeleaf on the server-side, and the idea of attribute driven directives in the HTML seemed very natural. It is. I have no doubt that these directives will soon find their way into native support in browsers. Try it. It's practical magic, and it works. Better than JQuery, I feel, once you get used to it.

As I worked with these technologies, I started to have a feeling, and I am starting to see that it is more or less accurate: with planning, a common code base can be used with PhoneGap and Native Browser Mobile like ChromeOS and Firefox OS, using a Dependency Injection framework like AngularJS with a templating framework like Saxon-CE. More than this, Angular and JSON shine on PhoneGap, where you are contending with an existing VM, and Saxon-CE runs really slow; on Firefox OS, with native JavaScript, AngularJS is harder to work with and less necessary, and Saxon-CE performs well.

#AngularSaxon #AngularSummer

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

New Glue: Using Angular and CSS pseudo elements

My overall plan for Rhizome is to auto-schema-generate Views - partial HTML5 ng-includes - which I have bundled up as ordered lists, combined with CSS3 pseudo elements to inject in application labels, positioning of elements and so forth. The idea is that a change to the underlying schemas should require regeneration of the Views, but not of the application.

<ol id="prescriptions">
    <li ng-repeat="prescription in pmix.response.prescriptions">
        <div class="pmpPrescription">
            <span class="pmpPrescriptionNumberText" ng-bind="prescription['pmp:PrescriptionNumberText']"></span>
            <span class="pmpDrugRefillNumberCount" ng-bind="prescription['pmp:DrugRefillNumberCount']"></span>
            <span class="pmpPrescriptionFilledDate" ng-bind="prescription['pmp:PrescriptionFilledDate']['nc:Date']"></span>
        </div>

        <div ng-repeat="prescriptionDrug in prescription['pmp:PrescriptionDrug']">
            <div class="pmpPrescriptionDrug">
                <span ng-bind="prescriptionDrug['pmp:DrugProductNameText']"></span>
                <span ng-bind="prescriptionDrug['pmp:DrugStrengthText']"></span>
                <span ng-bind="prescriptionDrug['pmp:DrugUnitOfMeasureText']"></span>
            </div> 
        </div>
    </li>

</ol>

And then the corresponding stylesheet looks like:

/* Prescription resource labels: */
.pmpPrescription::before {

   content: "Prescription #: ";        
   font-weight: bold;
}
 

.pmpPrescriptionDrug::before { 
   content: "Prescription Drug: ";
   font-weight: bold; 
}

.pmpDrugRefillNumberCount::before { 

   content: "("; 
}
 

.pmpDrugRefillNumberCount::after { 
   content: " refills)"; 
} 

And the resulting screen looks like:

Prescription #:  RX-12453 (3 refills)
Prescription Drug: Hydrocet LOW 5MG

Resource-based Mobile Links:

http://www.dfki.de/~sonntag/ubicomm10.pdf
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16674717-the-agile-architecture-revolution
http://sharedservices.lnwprogram.org/sites/default/files/XJC_-_Art_of_the_Possible.pdf 

Monday, August 05, 2013

Strategy: Turning Theory into Practice

I have been reading The Strategy Book, by Max McKeown. This is a very short review because I haven't read the book fully yet, and because no approach to business strategy can be evaluated immediately. It takes time to implement business strategy, and it takes longer to evaluate success.\

On thing that strikes me, and perhaps this is because I am a consultant and implementer, not a business person, is that the strategy approach described is very active - "Strategy in Action" - which makes sense. But my personal strategy is very passive, or rather, responsive. It's not a right/wrong thing, but relates more to what you are trying to accomplish.

So when I read "Position, Intention, Direction", I can't disagree that these things are an important part of strategy. And then these criteria are described in terms of Objective, Context, Challenge and Success. This is fine-grained, but my own personal strategy, as I have described, is intentionally responsive:

Vision - what is the message you are creating or are hearing?
Precision - is your description of the problem-space accurate?
Concision - have you removed all the noise from your message?
Decision - can you act upon your vision?

So these are responsive criteria, with the last cutting over into active territory. Decision is where you cut over from "-ision" to "-ition".