So what is the travel hat?

It's simple. It's the unique hat of power - my precious - that travels all around the world. There are some simple rules. You are expected to try to give the hat as soon as possible, to a good friend in which you trust. That friend is expected to take it to a new city where the hat has never been before. Diversity is a major factor for the hat so it's supposed to go to new and exciting places every time he travels. If you can you should choose for the diversity of the destination. Once reached that destination the search for a new owner begins.

This is still a alpha version so there are some known issues like the invalid rss feed (aka the nonexistent rss feed, because the stylesheet is still not implemented)

Upcoming Features:

• Does not highlight current location.
• Does not show total miles traveled.
• Does not show total countries visited.
• Does not list the nationalities that held the hat.
• Stylesheet to create the feed from the XML file.
• Administration system with db2 pureXML.
• Improve (aka do some) webdesign.

Follow it's latest adventures on thetravelhat.com.

Desde que entrei no DB2 Students Group na condição de embaixador tive o privilégio de aprender e mexer com algumas soluções da IBM. Entre o rol de coisas que me agradaram (não vamos falar de coisas tristes, como o IBM_DB adapter para Ruby que na altura estava bastante desactualizado) foram a possibilidade de usar alojar xml nativamente na base de dados. O pureXML com suporte para XQuery foi algo que usei durante o semestre passado em projectos como o Open Source Online Testing System. O facto da LeFevre ter implementado o Mondrian no DB2 também é um ponto a favor para qualquer maluquinho da segurança dos dados. E todos tiveram a oportunidade de ver que implementei o Mondrian no ultimo semestre no âmbito da unidade curricular de criptografia e segurança de sistemas informáticos.

O Data Studio Developer é uma ferramenta para developers que usam DB2. Entre as novidades da nova versão está o suporte para PureQuery e o facto de usar o mesmo tipo de tecnologia de persistencia que a usada no Project Zero. Continuam interessados? Então podem sacar aqui.

Pois bem, encontrei um link muito bom no developer works que mostra como implementar a mesma em seu banco de dados.

Aqui está o material: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0605singh/

Ainda para quem gosta de banco de dados, não necessariamente DB2, recomendo dar uma olhada em meus posts anteriores aqui -> http://jmmwrite.wordpress.com/category/db2/

Enjoy!

[sourcecode language="ruby"]qs.first.question_text.lstrip
=> "Which of the following is the correct syntax to set the DB2COMM variable to TCPIP?\n "[/sourcecode]

If DB2 was had a good DB2 driver and a ActivePureXML (or something adapter) it would so f*ckin rock. Just look at the sample. And the dynamic nature of ruby would enable the flexibility of xml documents.

Please IBM please. DB2 for mac and decent support on Ruby. Don't make me write things like this no more:

[sourcecode language="ruby"]# Once again fixing IBM_DB bugs the ugly way
# with_scope anyone?
add_index :'ots_schema.users', :login[/sourcecode]

or
[sourcecode language="ruby"]
t.column :document, :xml[/sourcecode]

Most rails developers use OS-X. Mostly because rails is built-in the latest release (Leopard) and TextMate offers a great IDE to use with Rails. Some could argue that it also works nicely on Windows but I really believe that Rails ain't done to be used on a Windows Platform. Many articles and interviews with rails creator DHH second this statement. Rails is easy to develop in OS X and deploy in a Linux distro of your choice.

In my most recent screen-cast I explored an interesting technique of taking advantage of rails RESTful design and DB2 pureXML features to easily create a web-service that could query a relational databases with XML support (like DB2). As you must know DB2 Express-C is distributed freely and offers no limitation to home users/small companies. So it would be awesome to expand ActiveRecord to support xml elements, if a schema was provided to the database.

I'm aware that a pure xml database stategy would be a bad approach but there are situations when it simply makes sense. And in those situations one would profit greatly of two things wich are missing.

• XML Support for ActiveRecord - in construction?
• DB2 for Mac - will this ever exist?

Antonio Cangiano is creating a plugin that revolves around this concepts, but in a DB2 centered perspective. In my opinion it would be best if the rails plugin worked not only for DB2 but for any database adapter with XML support - as long as such is provided.

Let me give you a sample. Imagine that you have a database model for translating you rails application. It could be something like:

Languages

• ID, int
• DOCUMENT, XML

Imagine that the xml file is
[sourcecode language="xml"]
Olá
Até a próxima!

(...)
[/sourcecode]
If this makes sense in your application then you could easily do something like register your model to observe (see observer design pattern) the session['language'] for changes and, if it's changed, it would get all the XML for that language - it would fall back to default if such was not available - and create the hash with the values. The problem with this approach - besides making no sense for the internationalization problem! - is that in the observer model you would have to:

[sourcecode language="ruby"]Language.find :first[/sourcecode]

And fetch the whole xml and then process it. If the XML document has 10MB, it would take some time. With XQuery support on ActiveRecord we could simply

[sourcecode language="ruby"]Language.find :first,
:xcondition => ["//language[@isoname==?]",
session['language']][/sourcecode]

Or, if we simply wanted to say hello in many languages - like flickr in their first page - we could simply

[sourcecode language="ruby"]Language.find :first, :xcondition => '//hello'[/sourcecode]

There are just two problems that prevent rails developers from being able to do this kind of things. And those are the lack of XQuery abilities in ActiveRecord and the fact that Mac developers cannot use DB2.

We got this news from Antonio Cangiano, a IBM Engineer that likes DB2 and Ruby on Rails. Seems like a nice guy! :P

You won't find this new version on IBM DB2 Express-C Website, but you can download the Linux Version here and the Windows Version here.Mac version is still not available. This is probably the down side as many of us are waiting for IBM to ship a Express-C DB2 version for Macintosh. Hopefully next time?

I still didn't tested the new DB2 but according to Antonio

Version 9.5 brings to the table a great deal of new enhancements and features. Among these there is also the reduced amount of memory requirements and the improved efficiency of operations on Linux. Oh and it will also make you rich and more beautiful. I mean, pureXML support has been greatly improved and it is a release that is sure to please many people on both Windows and Linux.

I know the t-shirt looks great. Hopefully Vítor will send me one! :P

Fiz uma apresentação de 15 minutos (que foi péssima devida ao pouco tempo) na FEMA-Assis no dia 04/10/2007 mostrando um pouco do artigo.

A apresentação e o artigo podem ser baixados nos seguintes links:

Artigo- http://dcon.com.br/jd.comment/juliano/Artigo_Juliano_v9.doc
Apresentação- http://dcon.com.br/jd.comment/juliano/DB2_pureXML_public.ppt

Foram retiradas algumas figuras da apresentação por questões de direitos autorais.

Espero que aproveitem.

Por favor, podem sugerir melhorias, criticar, etc.

Abraços,

Juliano

Another thing worthy of mention, the post Cangiano made about Haskell. It's called Haskell Eye for the Ruby Guy and, in a certain way, represents that topic introduced here some days ago. Definitely worth the time you will spend reading it.

The ever growing software complexity requires the power of high level abstractions and the functional paradigm which helps us adopt a more declarative programming style where the side effects are marginalized.