Kurt Cagle

In Star Trek, Scotty – James Montgomery Scott – was my favorite character, perhaps inevitably. Spock was always the cool and collected uber-genius, inscrutable and forced into an emotional straightjacket, and while the parallels to the real politik of the time are obvious, to me Spock has always been the epitome of the pure ivory tower researcher. Scotty, on the other hand, was the enginee , in many ways the ultimate hacker. Spock may have been able to tell you what properties of dilithium would induce warp speed, but Scotty knew exactly how to crack the damn crystals in such a way as to eke out that last 0.5 warp factor necessary to escape the baddies chasing the Enterprise. Scotty knew about estimates – and how much you could pad an est... (more)

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Seeing XML with Serialization

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developin... (more)

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: The Effects of AJAX

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developin... (more)

The Real Niche forWeb Services: Part 2

Last month, in Part 1 of this article, I cautioned about the potential invasiveness of Web services. It's a scary thought that companies could have that much personal information about their customers, but I added then that there are some advantages to Web services, especially in the area of business-to-business. This month I focus on these advantages. The Last Gold Rush Business-to-busin... (more)

XML Query and the Next Generation Web

Anyone who has ever done a search query on the Internet is familiar with the phenomenon in which a single query pulls up more than a million possible search matches. This has to do with the fact that information is ultimately not linear, but rather is linked and interrelated in ways that can't be quantified easily through text searches. When I was in college at the University of Illinois ... (more)