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

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

Mukul,

Re: your examples -

#1. Complex Business Logic. I've actually found that if you break business logic down into state transitions, XML-based solutions are actually more effective there than Java ones are, in part because of the templating capabilities of XSLT, in part because it makes changing business logic simply a matter of changing a particular set of pragmas in an XML document (I've done some very sophisticated BL type work using ISO schematron, for instance).
#2 Game Programming. Again I'd differentiate here between the rendering modules (which I would agree should be handled only via imperative code because of processing speed limitations, though it should be pointed out that OpenGL is for the most part a declarative language) and game logic, which I'd argue is a specialized case of #1. Note even here, though, most game engines maintain declarative data objects with very low level (CRUD type) APIs, rather than maintaining the overhead of a full OOP object for every entity instance in the game. I wouldn't necessarily use XML here, but that doesn't mean that what's involved isn't defined within the context of a declarative state diagram and timed transformations on those diagrams.
#3 GUI Programming. Er, um ... given the migration to HTML/AJAX based systems of nearly all GUI-based applications, I'd question this. JavaScript/AJAX may be involved, but again its a relatively simple mapping in both cases to turn external JavaScript working on objects into internal JavaScript bindings to a declarative (XHTML or HTML) environment. My suspicion is that by by 2015, imperative GUI programming will be rare.

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

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Roger,
  There are many software applications, which need imperative
programming infrastructure (where we should be able to change program
state at will, like using assignment statement as so on).

Examples of such applications could be,
1. Complex business logic (say I am implementing a work flow for an
insurance company)
2. Game programming :)
3. GUI programming

and so on.

To my opinion, none of the above tasks can be done (or easily done) in
XML based languages.

Whereas XML based languages are specialized to process XML data.

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 9:08 PM, 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

--
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi

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