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Ralf Westphal

Ralf Westphal is editor-in-chief of the leading Visual Basic magazine in Germany: BasicPro. In addition to this he works as a freelance consultant on Visual Basic projects, Internet technologies like XML, and database-driven web sites. Since 1998 he is also a Microsoft Regional Director and a speaker at developer conferences, workshops, and seminars on topics like COM object models, scripting, or XML.

The past years Ralf has devoted to his company Mey & Westphal RIPOSTE Software - of which he was a co-founder -, a manufacturer of highly specialized software for the roller-shutter industry.

In addition he has worked as a technical leader on projects for international companies like Digital Equipment Italy, Milan, and ISE Inc., Washington DC.

Ralf lives with his wife in Hamburg, northern Germany, very close to a beautiful inner-city lake, the Alster. He is very happy to be able to work from home most of the time.

Articles by this author

XML & Object Persistence: Roll Your Own

In the third and final part of this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal shows how to create your own XML data format for serializing and deserializing objects.

XML & Object Persistence: Serialization Problems

In part two of this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal picks through some of the difficulties involved in object serialization, including how to maintain hierarchy and structures.

Using XML for Object Persistence

In this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal explains object persistence and details some of the issues involved in maintaining an object's data, hierarchy, and structure. He then shows how to create your own XML data format for serializing objects.

Building a Better Metasearch Engine

This two-part tutorial demonstrates how XML can be used to improve how search engines work. It shows how to automate retrieval of search results and when those results are available in XML, instead of HTML, how much more easily they can be organized and displayed for users. This demo requires IE 5 because the XML processing is done on the client side.