[exprla-devel] XMLScript and some ideas
Status: Pre-Alpha
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From: reid_spencer <ras...@re...> - 2002-01-31 08:31:43
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--- In xpl-dev@y..., "Richard Anthony Hein" <935551@i...> wrote: Hi everyone, I joined this list yesterday, and have been reading the archive. I plan on being a contributer, by using my database development experience (Access, SQL Server), and VB to the table. I have been heavily into XML and related technologies since around November 1999, read the specs on the DOM level 1 and 2, XML, XSL (wow it's long!), and am just about done XPath at this point. Oh yeah, also XSLT and XML Schema and SOAP. However, I haven't been able to really put this all to use yet. I shall. Now, I want to ask if anyone has seen the work on XMLScript? You can see what has been done at www.xmlscript.org. I think that what we want to do here is bigger than what XMLScript encapsulates ... however, that doesn't mean we can't use XMLScript as a base for what we want to do ... make a new fully enabled programming language specific to XML. XMLScript COULD be to XPL what JavaScript is to Java, and VBScript is to VB. Or, perhaps XMLScript will someday become XPL. Who knows; but it would be foolish for us not to consider this work, as it's well ahead of XPL at this point. In the meantime, I will say this ... the Holy Grail of XML programming would be the ability to write in any language which is defined by an XML schema (NOT DTD's!), and be able to transform that into another language. I am talking about computer language as well as human language. However, I am not saying let's work on human language translation ... but this work, if we all agree that this cross-language ability is important, could be useful in the future. Things we learn from translating across programming languages could be very useful in the future, when applied to translating human languages. So, is this a part of XPL's intention or not? Is the ability to translate across any programming language that has a well-formed and valid schema going to be part of XPL? If so, let's put that in a specification. We have the work of things like SOAP which well be totally helpful to us. SOAP shows us how we can wrap messages (think of them as method calls) in XML, and use that wrapper to communicate with any component that is SOAP enabled. This is amazing stuff, and practically makes Java nothing more than a language now, as Java's cross-platform benefits are really irrelevant now. We can use this idea to make translation happen. How? Well, if we wrap a C++ component/function/method in SOAP like XML syntax, and name it according to some standard convention that we realize in XPL, then we can map it to a VB component/function/method that does the same thing. In this way, the translation is not based on any real schema ... we simply have a source of information that can find the same component in any language. This is the easy way, and depends on having the same things written many times, in many languages. It's not really what we want to do, but we can use it to our advantage. How? :) We can use that method when we run into trouble translating ... for instance, someone pointed out: Java's dynamic class binding will not translate to C++ static binding, without the creation of some kind of object tag system for the C++. This is a problem. We could use a search type method to find components that do the same thing that the class in Java does, but in C++, using SOAP and SDL to find it, and then use that code to enable translation. If we can somehow make it possible to UPDATE the schema (using our search results) then we may be able to "evolve" the schema to meet these problems, so in the future, the translating powers of the XPL can use that schema update to know what to do. This is just an idea, and is probably full of holes, so go ahead and point them out or fill them in! Richard A. Hein dbSoft --- End forwarded message --- |