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I just recalled a July 2003 thread on the Federal CIO Council XML Web
Services Working Group listserv in which a writing by Norm Walsh on this
very topic was referenced[1]. Subject: "XML is Not Object Oriented". I
provided a somewhat lengthy contribution[2].
Kind Regards,
Joe Chiusano
Booz | Allen | Hamilton
Strategy and Technology Consultants to the World
[1]
http://listserv.gsa.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0307&L=cioc-web-services&F=&S=&P=1267
[2]
http://listserv.gsa.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0307&L=cioc-web-services&F=&S=&P=2510
Burak Emir wrote:
>
> Chiusano Joseph wrote:
>
> >Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> >
> >
> >>At 12:14 AM +0200 6/18/04, Mohammad Ghazal wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>Dear Sir,
> >>> I would like to know the relation between XML and the
> >>>Inheritance/Subtype concepts, I have read from several books and I
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>It's roughly the same as the relationship between a grapefruit and a
> >>bicycle. That is, there isn't one. :-)
> >>
> ...
>
> >I would add that W3C Schema has some features that one can say involve
> >inheritance, such as derivation by extension. But the bottom line is
> >that it's all about how one chooses to use XML.
> >
> >
>
> There was a quite controversial panel at ECOOP 2004 which talked about
> XML and objects. http://www.ifi.uio.no/ecoop2004/
>
> For Eric Meijer, XML was just a way to serialize (XEN or C-omega)
> objects - hence, I guess, you could say there is a relation, because
> objects have subtyping and inheritance, so you can somewhere use XML to
> model it.
>
> My take was this: With XML you can, among other things, represent data,
> such as the *state* of an object.
>
> The derivation by extension then comes close to inheritance, because
> your derived type has all the data of the type you derived it from.
>
> A derived type is a bit like a subtype - you can, in principle, use it
> everywhere where the original type (like the supertype) is expected.
> However, you have to annotate the enclosing element using the xsi:type
> attribute.
>
> BUT this is all very far away from the kind of inheritance and subtyping
> in OOP because inheriting the behaviour of objects (the methods)
> interacts with other things like overloading, overriding, refining.
>
> For instance, some languages (not Java) would allow you to have classes
> class Author;
> class BookAuthor extends Author;
> class Publication { val author:Author }
> class Book{ override val author: BookAuthor } extends Publication
>
> I do not think specialising the type of author (say, the first element
> in XML element content) can be done with XML Schema
> derivation-by-restriction, because restriction (and in general all
> schema types) speak about structure (restriction means regular language
> inclusion, it is not covariant, if you will).
>
> So in essence, you seem to get a form of inheritance for *state* with
> derivation-by-extension. To do subtyping etc. you do need much more than
> that, e.g. build a data binding framework that makes your classes
> correspond to W3C XML Schema derived types + something more.
>
> hope this helps. cheers,
> Burak
--
Kind Regards,
Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz | Allen | Hamilton
|
