xml-dev - RE: Ptr to Fast Well-Formed XML parser (Java)?

["Rob Schoening" <rschoening@unforgettable.com>]

> Would someone remind me where a page to commercially available (usable
> in a commercial environment - free or not) XML parsers is?

Check out the early access of Sun's XML package.  It's on their Products &
APIs page I believe.  It's not open source, but I suspect that it will be
well supported.  Since Microsoft is so close to DataChannel now, I don't
think that they can afford to let this market slip through the
cracks...especially with M$ pushing their new XML data typing standard
(can't remember the name at the moment).

> (BTW, it's looking to me like XML and Java are entirely suitable for
> ecommerce environments.  At this point I see XML as a nice open
> alternative
> to RMI for some of my work and see the possibility of better
> performance for
> certain aspects of what I'm trying to do - but that starts to
> stray from all
> of what RMI really does do which I don't appear to need for these
> purposes.)

Personally, I think that there is some real opportunity for innovation here.
If there was an XML-based spec for serialization and invocation, I think
that it might be possible to implement an IIOP-ish protocol using XML.  This
would be really interesting, IMHO, since it would allow the document and
component models to converge.  CORBA, EJB, and DCOM tend to be rather
heavyweight ($$$) in deployment.  But if the client could be pared down so
as to require little or no client-side code for certain transactional
systems, things could get really interesting.  For straightforward
deployments, XML over HTTP (or even SMTP) could have compelling value.

Imagine if you could take a DTD and build a server side component to process
it.  If you could apply translation to build an HTML or PDF form, the end
user could be tied in to the back office without the need to develop custom
software.  Groupware allows this now, but if you could cut out that layer of
complexity and have the browser speak directly to the middleware, without
the need to write application specific code, the benefits could be
tremendous.  After all, groupware breaks down at the borders of
organizations...at exactly the point where EC begins.

Just a thought...

There is an XML-RPC spec out there, but to my mind it misses the bigger
picture.  Might be a good stepping stone though.

Rob



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