Interview with Dave Winer

We caught up with Dave Winer, scripting pioneer and founder of UserLand Software. Dave's been scripting longer than most, and is known for his pioneering work on the Macintosh (ThinkTank, More, Frontier), and Web site management software (AutoWeb, Clay Basket, Manila). Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Mac, was ported to Windows, and now is the basis for content management products like Manila (server-based content management) and his newest creation, Radio UserLand.

Thirteen years in the making, Radio UserLand was released officially today (March 12, 2001). A "personal Web application server" that runs on your PC, Radio UserLand puts an industrial-strength Web server on your desktop. Apps run in the browser. Designed to be extended by developers, Radio will also appeal to the masses with its news aggregator and weblog features. Keeping up with the news and creating your own weblog is easy with this software. There's a lot of functionality inside this program, including Dave's passion, a Web outliner. Ultimately, Dave wants to make it easy for anyone to write the Web.

WebReference> How would you characterize Radio UserLand?

Dave Winer> Radio is a personal Web application server. It comes with a nice app that gets news via RSS and publishes a blog and RSS channels as output. But the app is just there as a bootstrap, to give developers ideas, and to give users a way to get started. To interest the developers, there have to be users. It also has a content management system built in because we have developed one, and most of the applications we like to do require content management, as they require HTTP and XML. Content management is a basic building block.

WR> How did Radio UserLand come about?

DW> I'd like to say that we all got together for Thai food and dreamed it up and knew what it would look like and how it would work five years ago, but that would not be true. ;->

It's been a zig-zag process, first we worked on the desktop (or workstation) in 1996, got a basic content management system working, then we moved to Windows, then we moved to the server, creating an environment that could serve thousands of sites on a $2K machine, then we worked on the browser-based interface in 1999 (Manila), and then we moved back to the workstation. It's an iterative software design process. Take a step, learn from it, use the experience to guide you to the next step. Since 1996 when we switched to Internet development, the goal has been to create a fantastic multi-user writing environment built around the Web. Radio is an important step for us in this process because we've taken what we know about the Web, HTML, browsers and servers, and redistributed the code so more of the work is being done on the user's workstation. This makes the centralized server much more efficient, and allows more people to write for the Web, which is what UserLand is about.

WR> I read that it is based on standards. Describe how each standard contributes to the whole. What does XML-RPC do, etc?

DW> It very much is based on standards, existing ones like HTTP and HTML, and where no standards existed we worked to help create them, formats and protocols like XML-RPC, RSS, SOAP and OPML. Each serves a distinct purpose in the Radio environment.

RSS is the standard format for news item flow in and out. Every hour at the top of the hour the personal aggregator reads the sources you're subscribed to, in RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92 and <scriptingNews> format. You can route news to any number of categories, each of which is rendered in HTML and RSS 0.92, so that other Radio users can read your feeds. So, for example, if you're the information maven in your organization, you could produce an HTML page for everyone in your organization to read, or email it to them at 8AM, and at the same time publish it in RSS so other Radio users can benefit from your research and the way you put the news together.

XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Call via XML) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) are used to implement publish-and-subscribe in Radio, so that you can receive notification when any of the RSS feeds you're subscribed to have changed. (Note: only if they support the <cloud> element in RSS 0.92.) Further, XML-RPC is used in upstreaming, which is a key feature in Radio. It's for people who want to move around or don't have a fixed IP address, or are behind NAT or a firewall. It's a free static XML server, accessible over the Internet, outside your firewall. Upstreaming is also key to the maintenence of the Hotlist, the Top 100 most popular channels, which is going to prove more and more interesting over time.

OPML is the native file format for Radio's outliner, which is used to author Web pages on Manila sites, and directories and slideshows, and is accessed through SOAP and XML-RPC. Manila is the most completely Internet-scriptable application in existence today, and Radio is wired right into it, through SOAP and XML-RPC, of course.

The basic answer is that all the groupware features in Radio are built on XML in one way or the other. And much more will be done around that in the future.

WR> You mention support for RSS 0.9-0.92 and <scriptingNews> formats. Any plans to support RSS 1.0?

DW> About formats, we like RSS because it's so simple and easy for Web developers to understand (we're all so busy!), and wish the RDF folks much luck, but at this point there doesn't seem to be much RDF content out there, and RSS 0.92 offers so many juicy easy features, we'll stick with that for the foreseeable future.

WR> How does Radio UserLand work?

DW> What a question! It would take almost 13 years to answer that. (The Frontier engine which is at the core of Radio will be 13 years old next month.)

Behind the Web server, there's an object database, scripting engine, editor, debugger, hierarchy browser, outliner, text editor, full system-level verb set, multi-threaded runtime, FTP, SMTP, POP, HTTP, XML, COM and Apple Event support and a hierarchical content management system. Radio uses almost everything we have.