Another thought on Postcodes and Addresses. The reason the phone book doesn't contain postcodes (as you would think it would be in the best interests of the Post Office) is because BT and the Post Office couldn't agree a price. Even more reason to take away ownership from them.

Martin contact me and I'll tell you about Delivery Point Codes. They uniquely identify a property(-ish). Wise stuff in the rest of the article though.

Back to the earth with a bump. We've purchased Sage MMS. The previous version (Line 100) was a screen-scraped DOS product. This latest version is .NET based, but no relational database at the back-end yet - just shared files on a network drive.

Still NASA doesn't exactly use leading edge technology.

Someone draw me a picture!

SOAP/Cocoon example using Google. The trailing slash in step 8 is important!

I've downloaded and installed Cocoon. The installation download says you don't need any extra files, but you will need a Java VM and a servlet container like Tomcat.

Don't rely on the installed installation guide, it doesn't guide you through the version maze with your VM and Tomcat installations. Use the online guide.

It's quite powerful, which means lots of new concepts. I wondered how you actually configured it, until I worked out that you edit xml files, there is no GUI.

I still don't really get what .NET is about, being out of development for a while, but Jon Udell has a review.