Re: building an object model of a XML schema

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> The sword that this whole concept is likely to fall on is whether or not a
> fairly simple set of behavioral archetypes is sufficient for tweaking
> generated classes so that data is dealt with efficiently. Another issue
> occurs to me too, and that is the adjustment of data "graininess" from the
> application standpoint. For example, if I have:
> 
> <point unit="mm">
> <x>23.3</x>
> <y>42.0</y>
> </point>
> 
> I probably don't want to generate a class such as:
> 
> class Point

What if the role of that "point" is something other than to
capture a point in two-space?  Perhaps it's purely an
artifact of one way to specify, for example, the curve
which the document describes.  Or it's part of a sparse
matrix representation.

I'm not sure I believe that schema-to-class tools will
really be flexible enough to deal with cases where the
appropriate application data model is a nontrivial
function of the one used in the transfer syntax.  Sure,
they can simplify code working with at the level of
transfer syntax ... but ideally, those syntaxes are
optimized for interoperability with many different
implementations, so they won't be optimized to go
in the core of any particular application.

- Dave