Articles: Qumran and Xen

I finished reading two very interesting articles tonight.

First was "Qumran in the Second Temple Period" by Y. Hirschfeld. Thanks, Jim West for the post that alerted me of this article. I enjoyed it and found it to be very convincing. However, I haven't spent much time on the archaeological evidence and so I can't say I'm really equipped to critique the essay. Can anyone think of some good counter-arguments or responses? I would appreciate it.

Second was "Unifying Tables, Objects, and Documents" by Meijer, Wolfram Schulte, and Gavid Bierman. I can't remember where I first saw a reference to this, so...thanks...whoever you are. I found it to be very interesting as well. The idea behind the essay was to come up with ways of extending programming languages (especially C#) to handle relational data and xml data natively. As someone who spends an enormous amount of time taking objects in my code from such data or to such data formats, this is very relevant for me. If you're interested, first check out the parent site and then read the article.