xml-dev - Re: Whither the Infoset

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

This is called marshalling. Attributes are another term for metadata. The
very first use of
"XML Metadata Object Persistence" XMOP
(http://www.openhealth.org/xmop/XMOP.htm) was to do this for VB COM objects
(it was otherwise hard to marshal VB COM objects by value) For a look at the
open source code at: http://www.openhealth.org/xmop/xmop.zip the COM
implementation was first done under IE4 (gasp!) XML which dates this to
circa 1998.

I haven't seen more than a scrap of C# so I don't yet have an opinion of the
language, all I can say is that this XML integration, if it really exists,
is no better, nor worse, than that for Java or C++.

To be honest, if an open source version of a C# XML parser, DOM and XSLT
processor were available, open source because I won't go back to dealing
with implementations I can't fix myself if I have to (and I frequently have
had to), if such an implementation were available, and it were to be both
more understandable *and* faster than what is currently available for C,C++
and Java, then I might start getting interested in C#. Maybe MS can also
provide an IL compiler for XSLT, like Sun's for the Java VM. Yeah that would
get my interest.

Of course if I were to mention that it is easy to send XSLT over the wire as
well, this wouldn't be worthy of a news item. The reason I haven't had the
need to much further develop XMOP myself is that I've lost interest in
marshalling objects written in X language (been there, done that) and gained
interest in sending data itself as XML.

Yeah Len, its friday and a chilled one is waiting, cheers :-))


----- Original Message -----
From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@ingr.com>
To: <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 4:30 PM
Subject: RE: Whither the Infoset


> Here is a good diversion.  Really worth reading:
>
> http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html
>
> A quote to whet appetites:
>
> "One fairly good example of this is how XML
> integrates with C#.  We have this notion of attributes
> in C# that allows you to add declarative information
> to types and members... we also give you the ability
> to put attributes on classes and on fields in your
> classes that say "When this class goes to XML, it
> needs to become this tagname in XML and it needs to
> go into this XML namespace.... the system can simply turn a
> specific class into XML, send it over the wire, and
> when it comes back we can reconstitute the object
> on the other side... you can ask our XML serialization
> infrastructure or our Web services infrastructure to
> translate any given class into XML... take the schema
> for the class... build a specialized parser that takes
> derives from our generic XML parser... then override
> methods and add logic into the parser so that it is
> specialized for that schema... we've instantiated
> a parser that at native code speed can rip through
> XML...then we cache it ... until the next time
> a class with an indentical schema comes by
> and it jus goes 'BAM'  incredible throughput..."
>
> Wow.