Oracle won Retek bidding war. Here they are news.
My friend who is employee of Retek told me he would be a SAP employee. Because SAP gave offer to buy Retek. Retek is the leading worldwide provider of mission-critical software and services to the retail industry. I said if SAP buys Retek, it would get a great advantage in terms of Oracle competition. I thought Oracle (Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO)couldn't accept this situation. So today I came accross some news Oracle decided to take a role in this stage.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison sent a letter to Retek's board of directors. Here this is letter: Oracle Makes Cash Tender Offer for Retek at $9.00 per Share
I remember some news which mention Larry Ellison declares “War” on SAP. I've seen war between Oracle and SAP. Let's see who is going to win this war.
Let me continue the XML: XSL-CSS topic. I did search and looked a lot of web sites about that. I think I came a point that XSL/XSLT and CSS are not competitors, they are cooperating. Thank you Joseph Yi for the comment:
However, having used both technologies for many years, the best solution is to perform server side XML/XSL transformations and render HTML that will use CSS.
They should be viewed as complimentary technologies, not competing. (by Joseph Yi)
Two concepts have come to stage: Client-Side XSLT and Server-Side XSLT. I came across a good article about Client-Side XSLT at Digitial Web Magazine by Ken Westin: An Introduction to Client-Side XSLT: It's Not Just for Server Geeks Anymore Here it is some nice quotations:
Learning XML by itself is a bit like learning Latin.
We know that XHTML is XML, but it's not used by most Web designers on a day-to-day basis.
Since XPath is such an integral part of XSLT, they are usually considered a single entity. If you are familiar with databases, XPath is to XML as SQL is to a relational database. (by Ken Westin at digital-web.com)
So it's better to use Server-Side XSLT. There are a lot of concerns about usage of Client-Side XSLT like browser support, Google doesn't search XMLs, etc…
I think everyone heard about XML that stands for Extensible Markup Language.
So XML is Just Like HTML?
No. In HTML, both the tag semantics and the tag set are fixed. An <h1> is always a first level heading and the tag is meaningless. The W3C, in conjunction with browser vendors and the WWW community, is constantly working to extend the definition of HTML to allow new tags to keep pace with changing technology and to bring variations in presentation (stylesheets) to the Web. (xml.com)
XML specifies neither semantics nor a tag set. In fact XML is really a meta-language for describing markup languages. In other words, XML provides a facility to define tags and the structural relationships between them. Since there's no predefined tag set, there can't be any preconceived semantics. All of the semantics of an XML document will either be defined by the applications that process them or by stylesheets. (xml.com)
XML documents just contain tags defined by anybody and data. If you have a XML document, and if you want to show with a browser; you are going to need to add some display information. How? There must be some options.
If someone knows CSS, I think s/he directly will choose CSS. What about XSL (eXtensible StyleSheet Language)!
With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can add display information to an XML document. Would you use CSS to format your future XML files? No, we don't think so!
We DO NOT believe that formatting XML with CSS is the future of the Web. Even if it looks right to use CSS this way, we DO believe that formatting with XSL will be the new standard (as soon as all main browsers support it). (w3schools.com)
With XSL you can add display information to your XML document. XSL is the preferred style sheet language of XML. XSL is far more sophisticated than CSS. (w3schools.com)
I have seen some discussions are going about CSS and XSL on at xml.com.
Also there are some other explenations at W3C:
How is XSL different from CSS?XSL uses a XML notation, CSS uses its own. In CSS, the formatting object tree is almost the same as the source tree, and inheritance of formatting properties is on the source tree. In XSL, the formatting object tree can be radically different from the source tree, and inheritance of formatting properties is on the formatting object tree.
Aside from these technical differences, mature implementations of CSS1 and (parts of) CSS2 are available, whilst XSL is currently too new to have mature browser and content-authoring support.
Will XSL replace CSS?
No. They are likely to co-exist since they meet different needs. XSL is intended for complex formatting where the content of the document might be displayed in multiple places; for example the text of a heading might also appear in a dynamically generated table of contents. CSS is intended for dynamic formatting of online documents for multiple media; its strictly declarative nature limits its capabilities but also makes it efficient and easy to generate and modify in the content-generation workflow. So they are two different tools; for some tasks, CSS is the appropriate choice and for some tasks, XSL. They can also be used together - use XSL on the server to condense or customize some XML data into a simpler XML document, then use CSS to style it on the client. (w3.org)
So what do you think about XSL and CSS?
SAP has a product called SAP Enterprise Portal. If someone asks to you that “Do you have SAP Portal Experience?”. What are you going to respond? There are several options for developing portal content. Aren't there? I received latest SAP Community Flash: SAP Latest News and Events (03/07/2005) e-mail, and I found a good document there: Selecting an Enterprise Portal Content Developer Environment. It's written by Ajay Bhardwaj.
Have you seen InfoWorld Magazine (February 28, 2005 - Issue 9) recently? There is a article called “Whatever happened to yesterday's hot technologies?”; sub title is “Ten new economy darlings that never quite lived up to their hype”.
InfoWorld proudly presents a top 10 list of hits that might have been but never really were. But you never know; if the right people are listening, some of these dreams might yet become reality.
Here it is the top 10 list:
- The death of the mainframe
- Java everywhere
- Mobile broadband
- Voice recognition
- Microsoft Passport
- Improving the Internet
- The paperless office
- The Semantic Web
- Artificial intelligence
- B-to-B e-commerce
The second item is “Java everywhere”. It says:
From its inception, Java was meant to conquer the world. Highly object-oriented, it was more elegant than earlier languages. You could write Java code once, and it would run anywhere. It was fast. It was reliable. It was secure. It was … well, just about anything you could want from a development tool.
Given such outrageous hype to live up to, the extent to which Java has actually succeeded is truly incredible. And yet it?s hard to ignore its list of disappointments.
Applets were Java?s first dud. Macromedia snatched away the rich-media market, relegating client-side Java to the niche of cross-platform utilities and management tools. The language eventually found its audience on the server side. But by that time, years of ever-changing SDKs and elusive, often stillborn APIs had muddied its once-elegant design, confounding neophytes and making compatibility with earlier versions hopeless.
Java 2 brought us Enterprise Java, arguably the first mature version. And yet many shops still prefer common servlets to the more complex EJB architecture, the supposed crown jewel of J2EE. Meanwhile, those who take the J2EE plunge largely sacrifice Java?s write-once, run-anywhere promise in favor of their app server?s proprietary extensions. Today, with even staunch open source developers signing on to competing technologies such as Microsoft?s C# (via Mono), Java?s window of opportunity for world domination may be closing fast.
– Neil McAllister
All right Java community what do you think about that?
Consultants must be a good team player. SAP Consultants work very closely with customers, other consultants, key users, etc? I always tried to work as a good team player in my projects. My principal is that The more you help others, the more you earn I came across Morrison Homes career web site. I think it is a SAP Customer in Atlanta, because I remember I have seen a case study that is related with it in SAP web site. All right, here are some principals from Morrison Homes career web site:
Customer Focus
- Listen to the customer
- Consider their needs
- Set and achieve expectations
- Create raving fans
Respect for People
- Listen
- Consider their needs
- Communicate openly
- Promote safety
Teamwork
- Understand the purpose
- Participate and share ideas
- Respect and rely on one another
- Support team decisions
Continuous Improvement
- Have an open mind
- Look for better ways
- Take risks
- “Plan-Do-Check-Improve”
Let’s have fun! The most famous search engine is Google. Right? Let’s use google and do some searches. I was wondering directories of web. So I should use commands like that: “*.com”, “*.gov”; shouldn’t I? Let’s see:
Let me look my country Turkey’s web directories:
Don’t wait, look your country’s web directories! It’s amazing!
