Welcome to my personal website and blog. I've been active in the software industry since 1983 and have seen platforms come and go, so I believe in maintaining a web presence that is reachable on the public internet outside of any particular silo, and is under my full control.
I also maintain a presence on most social media sites, so please feel free to follow me on X or connect with me on any of the other sites on the left. If you're really old-school, you can also reach me on the amateur radio bands. My ham radio operator call-sign is K1XML.
Short Bio
Alexander Falk founded Altova in 1992 in Vienna, Austria; member of the W3C XML Schema working group that defined the XML Schema 1.0 specs; member of the W3C Advisory Committee; co-creator of the popular Altova XMLSpy XML Editor; established US subsidiary Altova, Inc. in 2001 and relocated to the USA; President & CEO of Altova; VIP member of the Kepler Society (Alumni Club of the Johannes Kepler University). Always interested in new technologies and creating new developer products that improve the software development cycle. As an entrepreneur and investor the focus is clearly on software, drones, IoT, and XML-related technologies. More career details can be found on LinkedIn.
Altova
Altova® is a software company specializing in tools that assist developers with data management, software and application development, mobile development, and data integration. The creator of XMLSpy® and other award-winning products, Altova is a key player in the software tools industry and the leader in XML solution development tools.
Altova offers a complete line of desktop developer software for XML, SQL, and UML; high-performance workflow automation server products; and a cross-platform mobile development platform. With over 5.5 million users worldwide, including 91% of Fortune 500 organizations, Altova is honored to serve clients from small and medium-sized businesses to the world’s largest organizations.
Recent XML Aficionado Blog Posts
I had the opportunity this past week to catch up with my friend Matthias Troyer, who
spent two decades as professor for computational physics at ETH Zürich and currently is
a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum
Computing at Microsoft. We spoke at length about Microsoft’s recent quantum
computing breakthroughs, including topological qubits using Majorana quasiparticles, and
discussed realistic timelines for future quantum computing developments at scale and
potential impacts on cryptography and cryptocurrencies, and in particular we covered
common misconceptions about the immediacy of threats to private-key security and
Bitcoin.
ETL,
which stands for Extract, Transform, Load, is a critical process in data integration and
management. It involves extracting data from various sources, transforming it into a
usable format through cleansing, aggregation, and conversion, and finally loading it
into a target system like a data warehouse or SQL database. In this 3-part video series
ETL Tutorial, we’ll walk you through each stage of the ETL process. The first video
provides an introduction to what ETL is and how it works, and why MapForce is an
efficient ETL tool. The second video takes a closer look at a very common use-case: a
basic CSV to database ETL pipeline. And in the third video we will take a look at a more
complex ETL example that requires cleaning and aggregating data from multiple CSV files
before loading it into a database.
We’re
thrilled to announce the new Altova Server Docker project on GitHub. This project includes a
pre-configured compose.yaml file and Dockerfile for all Altova
Server Platform products, providing an automated setup process for creating Docker
images and bringing up containers. All the configuration files are available under the
Apache 2.0 open-source license, and can easily be customized and modified for your
target environment. The modularity of Docker Compose ensures seamless orchestration of
multiple Altova server components..
Altova
is proud to support Microsoft Azure as a cloud deployment option for its server product
line, and is now offering the Altova Server Platform as a template directly in the Azure
Marketplace.
The Altova family of high-performance server software products is optimized to
harness the power of today's parallel computing environments to automate essential
business processes. Version 2025 introduces numerous enhancements across the Altova
Server products, offering improved functionality, compatibility, and performance,
including support for Azure Cosmos DB, SWIFT 2025, OpenAPI, auto-generation of EDIFACT
CONTRL messages, etc.
I'm
excited to announce that Altova has just released Version 2025 of its desktop developer
tools, server software products, and regulatory solutions. The new version introduces a
range of new features, particularly focusing on YAML support in XMLSpy, PDF and NoSQL database mapping in MapForce, automatic
generation of EDIFACT CONTRL messages, new features in our EBA and EIOPA XBRL add-ins for Excel, and
significant performance improvements across the product line.
I've
been using YAML a lot more in recent
months, and came to realize that there aren't any great YAML Tutorials out there, so I
wrote a brand new YAML Tutorial that covers everything from basic
syntax to advanced concepts and includes plenty of examples and use-cases, as well as
useful tools. It also includes a comparison of YAML vs JSON vs XML to help make you an
informed decision about which language to use for your situation.
Altova MobileTogether 10.0 was released on September 24,
2024. This version introduces features that will enhance development for various
industries. One of the most exciting additions to MobileTogether 10.0 is support for
connecting to mobile barcode scanners. This is in addition to the already existing
capability of scanning barcodes with the mobile phone camera, and supporting handheld
industrial barcode scanners is a game-changer for businesses that need to collect data
in real time. MobileTogether users can use a low-code approach to build solutions that
connect to mobile scanners, eliminating the need for specialized development teams.
I built a custom GPT recently that has been trained on all the Rotary International governance documents and
now can provide advice and guidance to Rotary leaders on various organizational levels who need support with
interpreting those policies and applying them in their Rotary clubs or districts. It's a really useful
little AI...
2024-05-14 (originally published 2024-03-07; previously updated 2024-04-21)
I
made up a little logic puzzle in early March and tested it with the most prominent LLMs, including GPT-4,
Claude 3, Gemini, Grok, Llama 3, and Chat with RTX. And today I've updated the findings with the results
from the recently released GPT-4o from OpenAI.
My goal was to see to what different degrees the various AIs would be able to solve the multiple
steps required to untangle this riddle and whether even a single one of them would be able to arrive at the
correct solution:
Sarah's mom has five children. John and Michael are twins, Maria and Carol were born 2 years apart. Maria is the oldest. Michael is the youngest. John is two years younger than Carol. The fifth child is one year older than Carol. The twins were born in 2000. What are the names of all five children sorted by age, and in which year was each child born?
GPT-4o was the only AI to solve the puzzle in one go, whereas Claude 3 Opus and Llama 3 required two prompts to get to the final correct answer. As of their current version, neither Grok nor Gemini can solve the puzzle correctly.
I
recently discovered Espanso - an open-source, cross-platform text expander tool that can be configured via
YAML configuration files. Obviously, I used the new YAML capabilities of XMLSpy to edit those configuration
files....
The march of technology waits for no one, and neither does Altova. In our latest release, v2024r2, we've
addressed feedback from the developer community, added support for popular standards, such as YAML and FORTRAS, and optimized performance across the
product line to help customers meet current needs with an eye towards future trends.
Let's look into how you can use an XML Schema in AI System Prompts to coax an AI into directly returning structured data in XML form that can immediately be used by an application for further
processing.
In particular we'll look at XML Schema design, system prompt engineering, application architecture, and a
few results and how we can use the MobileTogether app simulator for testing and debugging.
When setting up a MobileTogether Server in such a way that users will be able to access the
site from a web browser via the public Internet, you may sometimes want to hide the detailed
run?d=... URL that is being used to explicitly start the MobileTogether solution - this can be
nicely accomplished with an NGINX reverse proxy running on the same virtual machine and in this blog post
we'll discuss the exact configuration settings needed for such a reverse proxy.
Approximately 15-20% of SciFi stories deal with AI, robots, or other artificial beings becoming sentient. And of those stories, 60-70% include some form of significantly negative outcome for humanity. Therefore, I must ask the question: should we really incorporate these stories into the training corpus for AI development?
A copy of XMLSpy version 1.3 from 1999 landed on the moon this week as part of the Arch Mission Lunar Library onboard the Nova-C IM-1 Odysseus lander from Intuitive Machines. The lander appears to have tipped over and is now sideways, but the Lunar Library is most likely intact.
Chat With RTX is a new demo app from NVIDIA just released today that lets you personalize a GPT large language model (LLM) connected to your own content—docs, notes, videos, or other data. Leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), TensorRT-LLM, and RTX acceleration, you can query a custom chatbot to quickly get contextually relevant answers. And because it all runs locally on your Windows RTX PC or workstation, you’ll get fast and secure results.
Over the past few weeks I have now begun a new chapter of knowledge management and exported all of my content from OneNote, Google Keep, and from my blog and imported them all into Obsidian, thereby converting them into Markdown format and - most importantly - simply having them as regular text files on my laptop, instead of some proprietary format in some proprietary software. And having all of the information all in one place, instead of being separated between blog and internal knowledge base. The blog is now simply a one folder in my Knowledge base that I decide to share with the world by publishing it under the xmlaficionado.com domain.
With the new version 3.1 of Altova RecordsManager you can now create a complete database solution - with multiple linked tables, list views, detail views, reports, and example data - from just a single AI prompt written in plain English.
MobileTogether has stepped up its game by integrating comprehensive MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) support, empowering developers to craft MQTT-enabled applications with its efficient, low-code platform. This move significantly broadens the scope for creating a variety of IoT automation applications, from smart office solutions to large-scale industrial automation.