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There was a recent announcement of IBM extending Java this way - see
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/x-awxj.html
..dan
At 10:48 AM 7/21/2005, Gerald Bauer wrote:
>Hello,
>
> allow me to highlight the blog story tilted "Objectifying XML - E4X for
> Firefox 1.1" by Kurt Cagle. Kurt writes:
>
> Sometimes it's the little things that catch you by surprise. Deep within
> the list of the various new features appearing within Firefox 1.1, there
> was a short one liner about a new extension to Javascript called E4X. I
> was kind of curious about this, given that there was very little else
> that I could uncover about this, but it turns out the E4X is shorthand
> for ECMAScript for XML, a language extension proposed to the ECMA late
> last summer.
>
> The principle behind E4X is simple, but very profound. Currently,
> Javascript is rather stupid about XML - if you want to manipulate XML,
> you have to create a set of interfaces and use the W3C DOM and frequently
> some VERY painful treewalking or convoluted XPath calls in order to be
> able to do anything with it. I've long wished that there was a simpler
> mechanism for working with XML, especially as web development code is
> increasingly moving to an XML basis.
>
> E4X does precisely this. It lets Javascript treat XML as a native
> application type in exactly the same way that Javascript handles strings,
> numbers and regular expressions. However, if this was all that E4X did,
> it'd be not much more useful than DOM.
>
> Howevever, the other aspect of E4X, the one that is most interesting, is
> the fact that it "objectifies" XML. In other words, it lets you convert
> an XML document into a representation of an object, without having to go
> through the long, involved steps involved in working with DOM.
>
> More @ http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/06/objectifying_xm.html
>
>What's your take? Do you see any need for adding XML as a native type to
>scripting or programming languages or are existing APIs such as DOM, SAX &
>friends good enough? Has anyone used E4X already and care to share your
>experience?
>
>- Gerald
>
>PS: IBM has published an article on E4X titled "AJAX and scripting Web
>services with E4X" online @
>http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-ajax1
>
>_______________________________________________________________
>Vancouver XML Developers Association (VanX) - http://vanx.org
>
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