Doing Zero Fill with XSLT 2.0

I was scratching my head, trying to find a simple way to do a zero fill padding with XSLT and I could not find it in my Michael Kay XPath 2.0 book. It turns out he put in in the XSLT 2.0 book. I am not sure how the index missed it. Anyway, searching for "Zero Fill XPath" turned up nothing on Google. Here is how it works. Just use the following:

format-number(number(.), '00000').

Here is an example of the input and output:

Input	Output
1	00001
12	00012
123	00123
1234	01234
12345	12345

Hope this helps. - Dan

The Penguin, The Fox, The Weasel and the Elephant

Once upon a time there were four animals that lived in a magical “Land of Bew”: The Penguin, the Fox, the Weasel and the Elephant.

Each animal had their own way of looking at the world. Penguin and Fox loved to share their ideas.

Weasel also had lots of interesting ideas but he was afraid that if he shared too many ideas his owners would be worried.

Elephant always seemed to be around everywhere but didn’t pick up new ideas very fast.

In the Land of Bew most of the animals got along pretty well with each other. Fox played Penguin’s house and Fox played at Weasel’s house.

Unfortunately the Elephant was not allowed to play at the Penguin’s house. It was not that Elephant was mean, its just that Elephant’s owners were somewhat controlling.

The Land of Bew was blessed with special magic books. These books that allowed the reader to press on special words and pictures in the books and suddenly new pages would magically appear. The children of Bew loved the books and always wanted more.

But some of the books were very hard to make. Especially if you wanted nice moving and dancing pictures that children could change.

To make dancing pictures you had to use special type of black magic that sometimes got the animals in trouble. Goblins would sometimes used the black magic and cause havoc in the Land of Bew. ( I would tell you more about the horrible things Goblins did with the black magic but this IS a children’s story.)

One day Penguin and Fox found a new way of making dancing books that animals could use in magical ways without using the dangerous black magic. Fox tried it out and it worked very well.

But when they suggested their ideas to Elephant, Elephant said no. Elephant was worried that even kids would be able to make the dancing books. And she worried that all her friends would stop playing with Weasel and spend all their time over at Penguins house.

And although the story is not over…this is where our story ends. The ending is being written by you.

Want to try to make some dancing books?

Try XForms today and see if you can make your web applications dance without using any nasty JavaScript! And try to keep those Goblins out. OK?

The eXist OpenSource Native XML Database

After a suggestion from Kurt Cagle, we have been using the eXist OpenSource XML Database for a week now and I must say that it has exceeded our expectations.
It was a snap to download a set up. It was easy to get all the XQuery demos running and it was almost trivial to administer the little but annoying things like adding collection and users.
Unfortunately I did have to actual read the documentation to figure out how to get our XForms and XMLSpy to work with it. But once you know the secret, it is easy.
The big secret is that by just adding the words "rest" or "webdav" before the "db" in the URL you automatically and to HTTP GETs and HTTP PUTs directly to your data.
You can also actually edit the data directly in the eXist database DIRECTLY from within XMLSpy by just using the "Open URL" option of the XMLSpy editor and then just slip the "webdav" string into your URL path. Hopefully XMLSpy will allow you to use the XQuery editor in future versions of the database.
eXist had given our entire group a large boost of confidence. We can now build a Ruby-on-rails like environment just by drawing XML Schemas, generating XForms from the XML Schemas and storing the form data directly into eXist. A full application development stack without a single like of procedural Java or JavaScript!!!
I posted a short article on how to get XForms working with eXist in the XForms WikiBook
I have a FireFox T-shirt on order for Kurt and I am also buying beers at the first XForms conference...which I may have to organize.
Thanks Kurt! Your advise was very sound.

Computers Don't Create Models (Today) – People Do

I had several good comments about my posting about the increasing role of semantics in the "Era of Tera". I did not mention some of the key concepts that the Intel paper discussed and the impact these concepts will have on IT strategy. Here is an excerpt:

The problem is ordinary computers don't model things. Aside from supercomputers, today's computers aren't capable of developing mathematical models of complex objects, systems or processes. Nor are they powerful or fast enough to perform such tasks at speeds people demand. We can't plug in a statistical model for a rare malignant tumor or the behavioral pattern of a shoplifting employee and search for similar instances of the model in a data set. To benefit from the wealth of data building up in the world, we need to be able to communicate with computers in more abstract terms (high-level concepts or semantics). We need to speak in terms of models.

I believe that the core problem is that there will be a HUGE demand for highly-skilled data-modelers/ontologists in five years. But there will not be a large supply since this skill is not something that can be learned from a single class in college. Rather it is more of a tacit skill that is not easily codifiable.

That being said, there are many best practices that ARE codifiable. You can already purchase books on OWL/RDF and metadata registries, although most of them are mired in relational database models or written by academics with little real-world experience. You can read the Wikipedia articles on “Data Stewardship”. What is still needed is a single set of best practices and tools for creating families of machine-readable data models that can be use as a basis for creating exchange models. And we need to do this without having to learn how to represent all 12 types of UML diagrams in XMI and transform them. The NIEM subset generator is a good example of the solid XML-Schema-driven front-end of this process of selecting elements from a metadata registry and putting them in your shopping cart.

The bottom line is that this is really about empowerment. And unless organizations introduce semantic web technologies into their organizations at a grass-root level and support them at the CEO level, many organizations will be left behind in the Era of the Tera.

Era of the Tera

I read in the New York Times yesterday that Intel has produced a chip with 80 core processors giving it a total computing power of 1.3 teraflops. So the natural question is what could you use 80 CPUs for? The article referred to a 2005 Intel Paper titled Recognition, Mining and Synthesis Moves Computers to the Era of Tera by Pradeep Dubey. This article opened with the following quote: “The great strength of computers is that they can reliably manipulate vast amounts of data very quickly. Their great weakness is that they don’t have a clue as to what any of that data actually means.” Stephen Cass, “A Fountain of Knowledge,” IEEE Spectrum, January 2004. When I saw this quote, I realized even the hardware engineers agree semantics is now the critical factor limiting our ability to effectively use computers I realized that we must continue our mission to promote semantic mapping concepts. So let me summarize my feelings after reading this article:

If want to be able to leverage the power coming in the Era of the Tera, you must start with semantics – recoding the meaning of your data.

And if you don’t yet have a metadata registry…get one!

Right next to the CEO, CIO, and CFO in the board room should be your CDO (Chief Data Officer).