XML is 10 years old today. It's still an idea ahead of it's time, it's going through the phase now where the haters are all on it, but just wait another 10 years, and it'll be cool again.
I did a whole bunch of work adding XML to various crystallography programs, some of them in the CCP4 suite, and I'm hoping that in the future it will help some young programmer do something cool.
By the way, I've decided I don't have time to write struture cloud, I have some preliminary Ruby on Rails code written for it, if anyone is interested, just email me, it's all GPLed of course. It was going to be really cool, with a Ruby on Rails interface to all the crystallographic programs, jobs would be submitted to Amazon SQS, and then Amazon EC2 nodes would process the data by looking at the jobs in the SQS queue, and the results would be stored on Amazon S3.
It would be perfect for a researcher just starting out, someone who doesn't have a large computational infrastructure, they could go to a beamline and collect all their data, and then process it all on 100 computers at once.
It was going to be cool, but I've got other fish to fry now.
