Re: [xml-dev] Feasibility of "do all application coding in the XML langu

["Kurt Cagle" <kurt.cagle@gmail.com>]

Roger,

I'm coming late to this thread, but I had a few thoughts on this as well.

I think that working with an XML pipeline has a lot of advantages, but realistically, regardless of whether you use XQuery or XSLT, at some point you'll probably want to bind Java or other external objects to an appropriate namespace. If I wanted to do Fourier transforms on a set of data, for instance, while it is (barely) possible to create a native XQuery library for doing such, it would be hideously slow. On the other hand, if you created an FFT module in Java that bound the class to an XQuery or XSLT namespace, then I can see a fairly strong argument for agreeing with you.

I've been following XProc and Norm Walsh's efforts in that regard because I think that a standardized pipeline language can get you a long way in building most systems. The key to me seems to be intelligent binding.

On imperative languages - I think that you can in general replace most imperative "tasks" with declarative stateful diagrams, but its a mistake to think that there is a one-to-one equivalency there. You have to take different approaches with a declarative foundation than you do with an imperative one - even to the level of rethinking architecture. Since most programmers don't tend to think at the architectural level (a rather frustrating insight, actually) this means that most programmers who look at XML technologies try to build imperative solutions using a declarative hammer, and not surprisingly it just doesn't work.

-- Kurt Cagle
-- Editor, xml.com
-- O'Reilly Media

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:38 AM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

Hi Folks,

I am exploring the idea of "do all application coding in the XML languages."

Here is a response from a colleague:

"... in general XSLT is cool but limited. If your transform requires any "higher math" or advanced functionality or external code libraries (such as geometry coordinate system libraries), you almost always have to go back to a higher level language (such as Java) at some point."

Does my colleague make a TRUE or FALSE statement?

/Roger

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-- 
Kurt Cagle
Managing Editor, xml.com
O'Reilly
kurt@oreilly.com