Re: [Springframework-developer] ApplicationContext without the use of XML

[Aleksei G. <ne...@ka...>]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 10:57:58 -0300, Eduardo Issao Ito  
<zi...@su...> wrote:

> What about SDL? Its the HiveMind format. Its very clean, and as capable  
> as XML (it don't support mixed content, but is not used in config files  
> anyhow).

> The SDL web site:
> http://jakarta.apache.org/hivemind/sdl.html

SDL looks really nice, but are some one have seen something more on SDL  
than that page?
May be some specs, some working code...
Author mention HiveMind beta5 but threre no such release on Apache site  
(last is beta 4).

I've used FMPP text preprocessor (uses FreeMarker) and there are such  
thing as
TDD - textual data definitions - which uses very similiar syntax and  
conventions.
Altough FMMP (and FM) has very nice integration with XML I have some spare  
time to play
with TDD - and it was much more "humane" than XML.

But there are one more thing - XML has DTD'd, Schemas and editors aware of  
all that stuff. So one can edit context.xml in IDEA and its still that  
verbose - but validated and have some nice popups that suggest required  
tags and attributes. And I can use any XML-aware tool to transform that  
definition to some form of easy-readable docs and reports (or even to SDL  
or TDD). And I actually do this with fmpp for hibernate descriptors and  
spring context definitions -> creating some nice html with clickable  
cross-references. Of course I can use XSLT or even tricky CSS to just  
present raw XML in browser. That is the actual power of XML. And this  
can't be done with SDL or some groovy script - although I can imagine some  
special adapter which produce SAX events or DOM tree from SDL or TDD - i  
can't imagine all problems with integration of that adapter them into all  
tools that one uses now. Of course we can easily generate text/xml but...
It's nice to use TDD in FMPP to quicky setup small data model - but all  
(may be just lazy ;) developers must understand that they rejectiong not  
only boring ugly parenthesises and quotes - they reject that power of XML.  
XML is not thad bad. It's matter of usage. We can make our old XML configs  
much less verbose and much more human-friendly with little modifications  
to format. I even have some propositions for spring:

<...><value>some_value</value></...>  change to just <...>some_value</...>

<bean ...><ref ...="some_name"/></bean>  change to just <bean  
ref="some_name"/>
<bean ...><ref ...="some_name"/></bean>  to  <bean ref="some_name"/>
or even
<property ...><bean ...><ref ...="some_name"/></bean></property >  to  
<bean ref="some_name"/>

and may be we can rework some parts of config to be not so  
machine-oriented.

(don't take me toooo seriuos, please, and forgive me my bad english 8)

-- 

//regards, neuro