xml-dev - Re: XML and Objects

[Tyler Baker <tyler@infinet.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:

> At 06:40 AM 9/28/98, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> >At 20:47 27/09/98 -0700, Gregory M. Messner wrote:
> >>2) We desire to provide an API on the client side which exposes a simple
> >>mechanism for creating and modifying objects.
> ...
> >I think a number of people on XML-DEV have a very similar requirement: The
> >Coins approach, the SUN early release of XML, XXX (Steve Withall) and
> >JUMBO. We all want object functionality client-side. The balance between
> >client and server may differ, but we need an element-object API.
>
> This can/should be built on top of the DOM, right?  -Tim

Not sure exactly what Peter means by an element-object API, but the DOM has done
quite well for my needs to date.  I still believe there are many API changes I
think are necessary to the DOM to make it optimally efficient for applications
(for example CharacterData.getData() should return a character array or provide a
filler routine so that underlying DOM implementations can decide how they want to
deal with data storage), but as a whole it does a pretty good job.

I have an element-object API which I would call more of a data-driven XML
framework from the parser on up that allows the application developer to easily
map elements to objects dynamically (does not work anything like coins does).
This sort of framework is done natively in our parser, but this sort of framework
could easily be built on top of SAX as well.  I have found that for the DOM
implementation and an XSL implementation I am working on for a client, that this
sort of framework makes writing these sort of tools a cinch.  The only problems I
have had with XSL is understanding the latest draft in the first place (sorry I
don't have 10 years of document software experience on my resume).

Tyler


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