Eliot Kimber, senior solutions architect at RSI Content Solutions, spends most of his days helping publishers implement RSuite CMS, proselytizing DITA For Publishers, testing XML-to-EPUB3 conversions, and tending to his brood of hens and rooster. In his spare time he wrote a book: DITA For Practitioners, Volume 1, Architecture and Technology published by XML Press. On behalf of all his co-workers, congratulations Eliot!

Eliot has spent the past 25 years entrenched in generalized markup languages. He was one of the founding members of the XML Working Group, a co-editor of the HyTime standard (with Charles Goldfarb and Steve Newcomb), a long-time member of the XSL-FO working group, and most recently, a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee.
The goal of this book is to provide a detailed look at DITA aimed at engineers, tools builders, and content strategists – anyone who designs, implements, or supports DITA-based systems – as well as experienced DITA authors who want a deeper understanding of the technology they are using.

 

It's not often that the RSuite technical team gets to travel from their caffeine-laced lairs. But last week Rob Diana, director of product engineering, and Bryan Elliott, senior UI architect, attended the Emerging Technologies Conference in Philadelphia and reported back. The conference had record attendance and was sold out. Following are some of their thoughts on the various presentations.

Self Engineering, Chad Fowler (LivingSocial)

Bryan: The ideas presented in this talk were more life-hacking than tech-hacking---but the talk was inspiring. The premise was that of treating one's life goals as engineering problems, and using those principles---measurement, decomposition, analysis, iteration, etc.---to drive the goals forward.

Rob: The talk set the tone for the conference as a whole. Digging into other areas of the sciences can help with whatever you are working on. The measurement, analysis, improvement loop was a common theme in many presentations.

Javascript, Programming style, and your brain, Douglas Crockford (Yahoo)

Bryan: I didn't know what to expect from this talk but I am familiar with Crockford and some of his work. He proceeded to outline the motivation for creating JSLint and the reasoning behind some of the most restrictive cases, making a convincing case for each---citing reduction of common error frequency as the most common reason for most subsetting rules. I came away feeling humbled and knowing that I should probably lint 3.7 to, at least, understand where the failures were likely to be.

Ember.js: Attacking Boilerplate where it lives, Yehuda Katz (SproutCore, Ruby on Rails, jQuery core)

Bryan: Ember.js is a fairly lightweight (143k) framework that solves common problems in application development---the most notable being that of end-to-end data binding. That is to say, a single update to the client-side model of a ManagedObject would update every presentational instance of that Object with no further coding. This is the end result, but this result is enabled by an object model that includes many missing language constructs in Javascript; it can be, among other things, considered a "java.util.*" for Javascript.

Just beyond HTML5: Device APIs with PhoneGap, Brian Leroux (PhoneGap)

Bryan: (Web) Device APIs are an ongoing set of independent projects going on at the W3C, Mozilla, several Cell manufacturers and service providers. They are simply ways for a browser to get access to the device's hardware in useful ways. While the projects are all starting to converge now - and standards emerging - there are significant problems yet to be solved. Most notable of these are a common security model that asks the user for permission to perform a task in a way that is both not annoying ("may coolthing.com do this, please?" every 5 seconds) and not cursory (like the install-time permissions for Android apps, resulting in a “yeah whatever you like” response from most users).

Abstracting CSS for Sustainable UI, David Kaneda (Sencha)

Bryan: CSS can quickly become a mess for even the most basic web application. Less, Sass/Scss, and Stylus are CSS preprocessors that enable simple, abstracted style rules to be constructed that produce complex CSS. I had already considered using Less with the RSuite product, and this talk convinced me.

The Evolution of CSS Layout: Through CSS 3 and Beyond, Elika J. Etemad (W3C)

Bryan: This was a brief walk down the history of CSS, the technical challenges inherent in describing the CSS level 3 2d layout spec. Fascinating and lots of political intrigue, but not much meat to report on.

Emerging Programming Languages: A Tour of the Horizon, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Building Real-Time Web Applications, Aaron Mulder (Chariot Solutions)

Bryan: Discussion of Web Sockets and Web workers as enablers of real-time applications in a browser. Web Sockets are especially interesting to me to enable the server to push notifications out to the browser, rather than rely on polling. Web workers are less interesting to be in the context of RSuite: while they enable serious client-side processing without interupting the interface thread, the hardest thing RSuite does is parse JSON and XML - and because webworkers have to communicate via serialized data, that's hardly a help.

The Coffeescript Edge, Trevor Burnham (Author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated Javascript Development)

Bryan: CoffeeScript is a terse language that compiles into clean Javascript. I was aware of it before, and I may seek to learn it now. Integrating it into the CMS build process and the build for our plugins would be fairly trivial, and may be useful for writing better code but I don't intend to use it in RSuite unless a compelling case can be made, and even adding the feature may just be the urge to Kitchen Sink in every cool thing.

Javascript Testing: Completing the BDD Circle in Web Development, Trevor Lalish-Menagh (Comcast, EnvJasmine)

Bryan: Unit testing of Javascript code was not something I had considered to be feasible. I had always approached the UI testing question as an end-to-end matter: use Selenium to test your final product. This talk gave an example of how to unit test Javascript at build time, and enable UI developers (i.e., me) to notice a build break before commit, rather than after; how to integrate a platform like EnvJasmine into Maven or Ant; how to run a CI such as Jenkins. Being able to TDD my Javascript will be a nice change.

Storm: Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Realtime Computation, Nathan Marz (Twitter)

Rob: Realtime data collection and processing is a hot topic right now and Storm is an open source product from Twitter. Twitter uses Storm for much of their analytics tracking, so it is required to be a distributed solution. Basically, it is like Hadoop for realtime data.

The Programming Ape, Coda Hale (Yammer)

Rob: “Software needs to fit the human mind.” The basic idea being our brains are wired to do some things better than others. Pattern matching is one thing humans do well. As an example, a graph showing some performance metric might show a spike at some points, but what is the context and is it really a problem. Baselining the information and potentially showing a colored based chart is intuitively easier for humans to process.

SQL, NoSQL or NewSQL, Chris Richardson (SpringSource)

Rob: Simple comparison of some of the NoSQL solutions (MongoDB and Cassandra) as well as NewSQL tools (VoltDB) and why they can be used instead of a traditional RDBMS. MongoDB looks very interesting and could be useful for storing internal metrics. Cassandra is widely used but querying the data just sucks. NewSQL is really an RDBMS but with distributed scaling built in. VoltDB does not look ready for production use.

Emerging Languages, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Behind the Scenes with Spring Batch, Josh Long (SpringSource)

Rob: Spring Batch is yet another framework for batch processing. I am not sure if it would fit with our background processing or scheduled job frameworks, but definitely something to look into. I did not stay for the whole session.

Effective use of FindBugs in large software development efforts, Bill Pugh (inventor, Skip Lists; lead, FindBugs)

Rob: I joined this session half way through. FindBugs is a static analysis tool that can find potential errors in your Java code. He talked about prioritizing issues, customizing FindBugs, sharing issue data and using annotations with FindBugs. There was some mention of plugins but I would rather not worry about the structure of a class file and how to manipulate Java bytecode.

HTML5 Apps in Java and Scala with Play, James Ward (Heroku)

Rob: Not much about HTML5, but plenty of discussion about Play, a web development framework. Essentially, Play is a hybrid of Restlet and some of the Spring Controller ideas. I had hoped to see more information about the breadth of Play but it is definitely something I will be looking into for upcoming RSuite releases. Also, this was one of many sessions to talk about Scala, a newer language built on the Java VM. I will be looking at Scala to determine if it fits into our architecture and whether it would benefit us at all. Akka is another framework, used for actors and event-driven applications, mentioned fairly often and supposedly integrates with Play.

Building Applications with Functional Domain Models, Event Sourcing and Actors, Debasish Ghosh (Author, DSLs in Action)

Rob: This was a difficult presentation to follow. Slides were text heavy. However, the content was interesting and complex. Modeling functions or behaviors in the system as opposed to modeling objects is becoming more popular in the mainstream. By modeling behaviors, event-driven applications become much simpler to implement as they have a direct relation to your domain model. This was another presentation using Scala and Akka.

Kanban, Lean and Large-Scale Agile, James Shore (Author, The Art of Agile Development)

Rob: First, large-scale agile is really just more than one team using agile processes. Kanban comes from the Toyota production systems, where a Kanban is an empty bucket or bin. The basic idea is that we are trying to no significant backlog of work products. This means, no huge pile of requirements documents, but giving a partial set of requirements to the design team. This can be extrapolated to all of the groups on a project where they are assured of having a small list of things to be working on, and all of the teams are working in parallel.

Creating a Cross Platform Experience, Doug Bellenger (Movitas)

Rob: Movitas develops mobile applications for the hospitality industry. The apps have to run on various platforms, like the web, tables, blackberry, iphone and android. They created layers of abstraction when some things needed similar functionality, but the user interface or skin needed to be different. Knowing where the abstractions should be is difficult. There was not a lot of coding detail in the presentation, mostly just some high level concepts.

Webinar Series on the Business Case for Digital Content

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory are kicking off a 6-part webinar series next week that will address the many myths associated with the world of XML, CMS, and eBooks.

The six part webinar series called ‘Reality Check’ features experts in content management and publishing who lead the series and detail how to manage information and transform content to work within eBooks, browsers, and mobile platforms.

Following are the webinars in this series. You can read more here.

• April 26 | Truth of Digital Revenue Streams
  Panelist: Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group
  Having worked with hundreds of publishing professionals during the past 10 years, we've observed organizations that implement a strategic content management initiative and converted backlist titles into XML are the ones who are seeing digital revenue exceed print. Join this free webinar and hear the truths about what your organization can do recognize true digital revenue.
• May 9 | Truth About Automation
  For publishers and media companies, automating editorial and production tasks is necessary to keep pace with customer consumption as well as the competition. While many knowledge workers view automation as a threat to job security and an impediment to editorial quality, this webinar illustrates the truths around automating common editorial and production tasks. Indeed automation can free staff to focus on better content development.
• June 9 | Truth About ROI
  Panelist: Christopher Hill, VP Product Development, RSI Content Solutions
  Publishers understand that content management and data conversion is a pivotal piece in today's publishing environment. Yet budgeting for these initiatives can quickly scale to the point where executives question why they should stray from the status quo. In this free webinar, DCL and RSI Content Solutions, will lead a panel of publishing professionals who will discuss how they made their business case and received enthusiastic executive buy-in for content management and data conversion in their organizations.
• August 29 | Truth About DIY CMS and Conversion
  Panelist: Pat Sabosik, Elm City Consulting
  While using internal resources to develop a homegrown content management tool or convert your backlist to XML sounds like a cost-effective approach, the reality is that 82% or IT projects fail. This webinar focuses on the real concerns you need to address so that your organization can make educated decisions based on truths and not what simply seems will work.
• September 19 | Truth About Quality
  Panelists: Mike Edson and John Corkery, The DETI Group
  The premise of all publishing organizations is to provide quality content in a format that customers desire. Ask any copy editor about house style and you can anticipate a lengthy and thoughtful response. Authors too expect nothing but perfection when transforming intellectual property into a print or digital product. So how do successful publishing organizations blend automation into workflows without sacrificing quality?
• November 19 | The Truth From the Publishers' Perspective
  Panelists: Barry Bealer, CEO, RSI Content Solutions and Mark Gross, CEO, Data Conversion Laboratory
  Throughout the year, DCL and RSI Content Solutions have polled a large number of publishing and media executives to understand where they are in terms of strategic XML content management. We’ve asked tough questions around true revenue numbers, quality-control issues, content automation, and ROI. In this webinar series join CEOs Barry Bealer, RSI Content Solutions and Mark Gross, Data Conversion Laboratory who share not only the results of our 10-month polling but also their views on what the metrics mean.

No matter the allure and depth of digital products in today's world, publishers still need to print well-designed pages. At the last RSuite User Conference, we asked attendees what feature they found most useful. The ease of content transformations ranked high on the list of responses. Check out the following description about how RSuite CMS can automate content transformation to InDesign, HTML, EPUB, and PDF.

Want to learn how publishers are using RSuite to automate XML transformation to InDesign? Download our latest white paper: DITA For Publishers: How Successful Publishers Deliver Content

We’ve heard the allure of digital revenue for more than a decade. Yet many publishers still report that print supersedes digital. And a majority of publishing organizations continue to structure people, processes, and tools to support a print-first environment. In 2012 the rules have changed. Having worked with hundreds of publishing professionals during the past 10 years, we've observed organizations that implement a strategic content management initiative and converted backlist titles into XML are the ones who are seeing digital revenue exceed print.

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory are hosting a series of webinars this year that examine today’s publishing landscape. This webinar series will step back and differentiate fact from fiction. We'll present success stories that demonstrate how publishing organizations are navigating the world of XML, CMS, and ebooks to meet and exceed customer demands.

The first webinar of the series is moderated by Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group. Register for this free webinar and hear the truths about what your organization can do to recognize true digital revenue.

Webinar: Reality Check: The Truth About Digital Revenue Streams
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2012 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Moderator: Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group

RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, has partnered with MarkLogic for 8 years to provide world-class content management to publishing and media companies around the globe. RSuite CMS is a gold sponsor and exhibitor at MarkLogic World 2012, the premier event for organizations looking to collaborate with and learn from leading industry experts, partners, customers, and MarkLogic employees on how you can turn “big data” into “big ideas.”

“MarkLogic World is one of the most important educational events for organizations who need to understand how content-centric assets become revenue-generating products,” explained Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions.  “RSuite CMS has worked with MarkLogic from the very beginning to provide content management and workflow solutions to publishers.”

As a gold sponsor of the event, RSuite CMS will be visible throughout the 3-day conference:

• Birds-of-a-feather lunch
• May 1 breakfast sponsor
• Speaking May 1, 3:15 | Compromise Will Set You Free by Lisa Bos

Representatives will be available to demonstrate how RSuite is helping organizations like Oxford University Press, LexisNexis Pacific, Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier and many others manage content and assets. Schedule a meeting with one of our digital publishing specialists by clicking here or learn more at www.rsicms.com

Award-Winning End-to-End Automated Publishing Solution to Exhibit in The Digital Zone; Dan Dube from DocZone to Present Success Stories in the Digital Zone Theatre

DocZone Book Publisher announces its silver sponsorship at the 2012 London Book Fair at stand Y800 in The Digital Zone. The award-winning end-to-end automated cloud publishing team from RSI Content Solutions will meet with book publishers and demonstrate how their publishing clients save time by automating production processes to deliver content simultaneously to print and digital products.

DocZone Book Publisher will also be highlighted during two presentations in the Digital Zone Theatre as Dan Dube, EVP of global solutions at RSI, will showcase success stories of publishers using the system to produce multilingual print books and ebooks.

“DocZone Book Publisher continues to blaze a trail as the first fully automated ‘cloud’ solution for editing and producing both print and ebooks. We are pleased to show our latest release at the 2012 London Book Fair, where we will introduce new support for generating InDesign output from our XML-based publishing platform.” explained Dan Dube. “DocZone Book Publisher enables push-button publishing to PDF, EPUB, HTML, and InDesign. And with built-in language translation tools, it also allows publishers to reach today’s global markets by publishing to these formats in over 200 languages.”

Click here to schedule an appointment with one of our digital publishing strategists.

 

RSuite CMS Will Provide LexisNexis Pacific with the Tools to Efficiently Manage its Vast Collection of XML

Audubon, Pa.—March 27, 2012—LexisNexis Pacific provides world-class content and leading-edge technology designed specifically for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, accounting, and academic markets. LexisNexis Pacific recently licensed RSuite CMS by RSI Content Solutions. RSuite CMS is the leading content management system for publishers who want to manage, store, and deliver content to any channel, in any format, at any time.

RSuite CMS will replace several legacy internal editorial systems in use at LexisNexis Pacific and provide a consolidated and editorial system to manage its vast collection of XML, DTDs, metadata, and other content.

“LexisNexis Pacific has a wealth of great content and products,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “RSuite CMS will provide the LexisNexis Pacific team with workflow tools and content discovery tools that stay true to their mission of putting the right information into the right hands and giving people the power to change the world.”

“We required a content management solution that leveraged our investment in MarkLogic Server,” explained Andrew Squire, project manager at LexisNexis Pacific. “RSuite CMS is not only deployed on top of MarkLogic Server but it has the added workflow functionality that will enable us to centralise and normalise our content across all product chains.”

Every once in a while a company finds itself evolving and in need of a makeover. Really Strategies reached that point. The company's new name is RSI Content Solutions. "When we founded the company back in 2000, we were 100% focused on XML technology consulting to publishers and media companies," stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions. "Today, 99% of our revenue is from our software products and related services and we needed to reflect that in our company name."

The name has changed but the dedication to provide world-class content solutions to publishers, media companies, and technical publishers remains.

The new web site reflects the name change and also brings together our three content management software products---RSuite CMS, DocZone Book Publisher, DocZone DITA Publisher---under one url: www.rsicms.com.  Additionally, the new web site highlights more of our customer success stories. When our customers make statements like this, we want people to know!

“RSuite CMS combined with the DITA for Publishers framework is helping us achieve the holy grail of single-source publishing: XML content automatically delivered to InDesign and to multiple ebook delivery formats. The transformations from structured content to designed content have been seamless, allowing our staff to focus on content and product development.”
--Holly Gilly, Vice President for Product Development, Human Kinetics

"RSuite CMS is 200 times faster than our old system. The efficiencies we've gained are hard to believe."
--Keith Lawrenz, Senior Business Analyst, SAGE Publications, Inc.

"We selected DocZone because it is the only DITA-specific CMS available as a hosted solution that met all of our requirements."
--Nancy Thompson, CMS Implementation Specialist, Epson America

"We saw the time for PDF proofs drop from a week to just a few minutes with DocZone Book Publisher."
--Stephen Driver, Vice President of Production Services, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Over the next week, this blog will also have a face lift to reflect our new brand. We'll share more customer case studies as welll as highlight a series of webinars that kick off in April. Thanks for your interest thus far and stay tuned!

 

Publishers understand the value of XML but sometimes the cost of entry into an early XML workflow is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. The open source project DITA for Publishers combined with RSuite CMS changes everything.

DITA is a sophisticated XML-based application architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information. While enthusiastically adopted in the TechDoc world, DITA is less understood among traditional publishing organizations.  Until now. DITA specialist Eliot Kimber and technology evangelist Christopher Hill are hosting a webinar in March that details how RSuite CMS and the open source project, “DITA for Publishers" is  the toolset that launches publishers into the XML world and why this is critical. DITA’s unique extensibility architecture makes it a better business value than any comparable XML alternative. Eliot and Chris' enthusiasm combined with a straight-forward approach to CMS and DITA, will have you starting to take DITA seriously.

Webinar details

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

How Successful Publishers Deliver Content: RSuite CMS & DITA for Publishers

Panelists: Eliot Kimber & Christopher Hill