Hi everyone!
First of all... I'm personally very sorry for the LONG delay in our =
activity and direction.
But I'm sure that everyone has been as busy as I have, learning a great =
deal of features in C# and .NET.
Now with .NET on the street, we can make our work more stable, and don't =
waste time with version porting, etc.
So here it goes my new direction:
For the ones that haven't been following the latest news, the W3C has =
released a new DOM3 specification on 14 January 2002 =
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-DOM-Level-3-Core-20020114/). As you may =
already know, MS's own DOM implementation, the XmlDocument class, isn't =
much involved in the latest standards, and it even doesn't properly =
implements the DOM2 Events specification =
(http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Events/), so I wonder how did they =
implement the Mutation Events module (NodeInserted, NodeDeleted et all).
This loose compromise with true standards is threat to developers and =
the future of internet.
That's why I propose everyone to look very carefully to the evolving =
standards, and suggest we should work on real-world implementations for =
them.
I'd suggest as a first project in this direction, a full DOM3 =
implementation, and XmlEvents support in it =
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xml-events-20011026/), as well as a full =
XForms implementation (http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xforms-20020118/) =
following them. I strongly suggest everyone reads these specifications, =
as I think they will be very important to the future of distrubuted =
applications.
How could we start a DOM3/XmlEvents/XForms implementation?
1 - Update XmlDocument to provide full DOM3 compatibility, including =
Event bubbling and capturing. Please see the very ilustrative Apache =
Xerces project (http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/index.html)
2 - Add XmlEvents support: see X-Smiles implementation =
(http://www.x-smiles.org/)
3 - Create XForms base: again, X-Smiles is the only implementation to =
date.
4 - Add UI generation process from the XForms base. We should define =
what UI we will use. I personally think that with .NET ubiquity (the =
runtime will surely be distributed with ALL MS products), and the =
certain posibility of .NET ports to linux and unix (see =
http://www.go-mono.com/ and =
http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html), I guess windows =
forms applications and controls are going to be just like the swing java =
components in the portability aspect. So I would go after an UI =
implementation based on it.
The XForms specification is a very long one =
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xforms-20020118/), and a very =
comprehensive one, so I think the W3C has done an extremely good job in =
easing the path to a full implementation for us.=20
We need someone to take care of recalculation algorithm, which is one of =
the more complex parts of the spec. As I'm a laywer, I'm quite far away =
from algorithms as to build one of my own :))
BTW, I changed the project public name to NMatrix, as the "N" prefix =
seems to be the answer to java's "J" one for .NET projects (see NDoc, =
NUnit, NCVS, etc.). Matrix comes both from my devotion to a great movie =
and to the fact that our future work may become a matrix of standard =
implementations to build applications upon.
Comments and sugestions are welcome!!!=20
Best regards to everyone, and let's wake up :))
Daniel Cazzulino
PD: I'm going to make available a project for you to evaluate and =
improve. It's called the XGoF (I'm sure the name will be familiar to =
some of you), which means the Xml Generator Open Framework, and which is =
a framewodk for code generation for .NET. It's very extensible and =
flexible, and I hope you will make good use of it, as well as make =
necessary improvements.=20
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