Now you see it, now you don't
[Update: The article is back online again here as of 16th August 2007]
A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting post on IBM's developerWorks site entitled
"Manage Microsoft Office 2007 documents with DB2 9 pureXML - Storing and re-purposing data with PHP's PDO and XQuery using IBM DB2 9"
Written by Chris C. Gruber from Technical Marketing, Developer Initiatives, IBM and dated 24 May 2007 it kicks off by saying
Integrate your Microsoft® Office 2007 documents into your enterprise and Internet applications more easily than ever before with DB2® 9. Review older methods of data interchange with MS Office documents, and learn how MS Office 2007 offers better data interchange. This article discusses interchange with DB2 9 XQuery, Zend Core for IBM®, HP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), and Php Data Objects (PDO) technologies.
Interesting - and a great showcase for OpenXML you'd have thought. Chris' post has a .docx file you can download and demo scripts. It explains how easy it is to "use cross platform technologies like Zend Core for IBM, PHP, PDO and XQuery" to provide "a valuable part of content management and document management solutions." Chris says
"After reading this article, I hope you will find that consuming and re-purposing MS Office 2007 documents is easy with IBM DB2 pureXML™ features. Not much code is required, so this solution is easy to implement."
I know what you're thinking :-) Wow - IBM showing how easy OpenXML is to use and how powerful solutions can be created quickly and easily using cross platform tools. That's what I thought, and it looks like that's what someone in IBM's Standards Prevention Unit thought too, because the article has now been replaced with
"This article is being updated with current information. Check back soon for the updated version.
Please come back and learn how to easily integrate your Microsoft Office 2007 documents into enterprise and Internet applications with DB2 9!"
What a shame. Still for those curious enough to look, the long arm of Google has cached a copy for posterity [update: it's gone from the mighty google now too, but you can use Stephen's cache of Google's cache until I'm told otherwise], although the download etc still doesn't work. I've emailed Chris to ask if there's a PDF of it anywhere I can link to.
Anyway, here's how the page looked
and here's its current instantiation - what happened?
Too bad !!! Well at least we can see one of the PHP examples
And finally Chris' conclusion
My only comment would be to say that consuming and re-purposing OpenXML documents is just as easy - and IBM clearly know how to do it quickly and easily with industry standard cross-platform tools.