“I love it when a plan comes together!”
“I love it when a plan comes together!” Remember that old line from Hannibal on the A-Team TV show? I’ve been feeling that lately.
Why did we build our own XML editor?
I’m often asked what XML editor it is built from. The answer is that we built our own. Why? That would seem like madness. Building an editor, any editor, is very difficult. Indeed, I built my first editor way back in 1985 and in the years since I’ve built or customized many editors ranging from schematic editors for PCB and wire harness design, visual language-based editors for designing microchips, as well as a few legislative drafting editors. Of all the editors I’ve built, building LegisPro has been the most challenging.
What comes next in Legislative Information Technology
Two blogs ago I wrote about how technology waves come about, the stages they all go through, and the benefits and risks that come from when you choose or how you choose to ride a particular wave. Then, in my last blog I described what I see as the four generational waves in legislative information technology – starting with the mainframe era in the 1980s, the office productivity era of the 1990’s, the XML era of the 2000s, and the current standards wave starting in the 2010’s.
The Four Generations of Legislative Information Technology
In my last blog, I wrote about how technology waves define distinct software generations and how choosing to ride the waves determines the risks – both in terms of development risk and time to obsolescence. In this blog, I’m going to explore the four generations of technology I’ve seen in the legislative information technology market.
How Technology Waves have Shaped Legislative IT
Technologies come in waves. Rather than a constant evolution forward, major disruptions to the status quo tend to happen every decade or so. The resulting waves create generations of tools that reflect the times in which they were built.
LegisPro Update
Perhaps you have noticed that my blogging has been rather sparse of late. There is a reason for that – I’ve been totally occupied with the development of LegisPro. It’s come a long way in the past year. So what’s new?
I Have a New Book – on Akoma Ntoso!
If you are like me, learning a new technology by reading the standards documents is a difficult task. Standards documents are written to describe a technology, not teach it. They are supposed to completely describe the standard, preferably without resorting to examples to make their point. They use precise language and complicated words prescribed by standards style guides.
LegisPro Sunrise!!!
LegisPro Sunrise is almost done!. It has taken longer than we had hoped it would, but we are finally getting ready to begin limited distribution of LegisPro Sunrise, our productised implementation of our LegisPro drafting and amending tools for legislation and regulations. If you are interested in participating in our early release program, please contact us at info@xcential.com. If you already signed up, we will be contacting you shortly.
Using the <hcontainer> Element Properly
When I started my blog five years ago, I said would try not to get too technical. Overall, I’ve stuck to that. However, with Akoma Ntoso now essentially standardised, I think it is time to start covering some areas of it in a little more technical detail. So, from time to time, I’m going to delve into a little technical mumbo jumbo to cover some subjects that come up frequently.
LEX Summer School 2017
For the past two weeks I’ve been in Italy attending the LEX Summer School and Akoma Ntoso Developer’s Workshop at the Ravenna campus of the University of Bologna. This is my eighth summer school in Ravenna and my tenth overall LEX Summer School including the two U.S. editions. It’s always one of the highlights of my year.
