Re: [xml-dev] XML Schema: "Best used with the ______ tool"

[Boris Kolpackov <boris@codesynthesis.com>]

Hi Michael,

Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> writes:

> > I would actually be interested to hear about any non-trivial 
> > and practical applications other than "XML in, XML out", 
> > format changing kind, that are written exclusively in XSTL/XQuery.
> 
> How about an application for managing the creation, processing, and review
> of capital spending proposals in a large international corporation. The
> proposals are entered by form-filling using XForms, and each proposal is an
> XML document in an XML database. The rules defining the approval process
> (based on the nature of the capital project) are defined in a business rules
> document, also XML, (for example "anything over $1m requires CEO approval")
> and the abstract roles defined in that document (such as "CEO", or "finance
> controller, Taiwan") are mapped to real people in another XML document
> generated by a transformation of an XML dump of the LDAP directory. There's
> also an XML document that defines the corporate reporting structure, or
> actually two structures one functional and one geographic. These rules are
> used to construct an approval schedule for the proposal, which is also
> stored in the XML database, and emails are sent to the relevant people at
> the relevant times, with clickable URLs that they can use to access the
> application and approve or deny requests, or ask for more information.
> There's a full query/reporting system built using the same technology: you
> define a query by form-filling using XForms, and this generates an XQuery to
> get the data from the database and an XSLT stylesheet to format the query
> results.
> 
> I believe the only parts of this application which are not written in XSLT,
> XQuery, XForms, or the Orbeon XML pipeline language (a precursor to XProc)
> are one or two simple extension functions to do things like sending an email
> or translating Base64 data from the LDAP directory. 

Thanks for the example. While interesting, it sounds like a fairly
isolated, "XML in, XML out" application which does little more than
capture, chop up, and translate XML documents. As you admitted, the
only two interactions with the outside world (LDAP and email) had to
be implemented using something else. For this kind of applications,
I believe, everyone agrees XQuery/XSLT is quite suitable.

Boris

-- 
Boris Kolpackov, Code Synthesis Tools   http://codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog
Open source XML data binding for C++:   http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsd
Mobile/embedded validating XML parsing: http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsde