Re: [xml-dev] Lessons learned from recent projects and what of 2007?

[Manos Batsis <manos_lists@geekologue.com>]

Quoting Stephen Green <stephen_green@bristol-city.gov.uk>:
> 1. Pro XML: the business benefit of changing the model and
> just regenerating without changes needed to the applications
> except at the point where there is advantage to be taken from
> the change - this seems to be achievable to the extent the
> 'freeb-ubl', 'xslt4xforms' and 'xforms4ubl' projects show

Shameless plug but here it goes anyway: J2EE devs may appreciate MD4J
[1], a passive code generator in the form of an Ant (and soon Maven)
build task, that generates a J2EE application from your XMLized model
(currently Hibernate 3 mappings).


> 2. Con XML: the actual technologies themselves for doing this
> are still at an early stage of development and very limited in
> functionality and actual delivery of their potential and promise

True. For me it was a delima; either announce early to get some interest
to help the project move forward, or wait untill it reaches a certain
level of quality and user friedlyness (and risk having it end up in
/dev/null).


> So these two have to be weighed at a fundamental level when
> applying the technologies of XML, such as XSLT and XForms.


BTW the generators currently employed are using XSLT under the hood. I'd
like to support XMI, RNG and RDFS/OWL as input, but XForms seem very
distant to me. I guess i always had a bad impression for XForms because
OS tools are not there yet. As a webapp oriented dev, i'm tired of
seeing everyone trying to fill the client support gaps on the server's
side. It is a noble effort but...

[1] http://md4j.sourceforge.net/

Cheers,

Manos