Re: [xml-dev] Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM)

[Lech Rzedzicki <xchaotic@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Olivier Rossel <olivier.rossel@gmail.com> wrote:
> after just a few minutes of reading:
> CAM looks great to enforce subtle non-trivial validation rules in your schema.
> but defining the structure of the document directly from a sample XML
> structure sounds extremely low-level.

I have to agree and openly criticise reinventing the wheel. The IBM
article mentions building a better mousetrap, but it forgets that very
often programmers reinvent the wheel. There is a very validation
engine out there that both the thing that CAM does and it's called
RelaxNG.
Unsurprisingly, CAM uses XPath for businness rule validation, which is
exactly what RelaxNG has with Schematron rules.
Relax, especially in it's compact syntax is far more readable, in my
view, for defining structure.

> i hope some people from CAM are around so we can discuss those points.

I hope so too, I really would like to see the effort being pointed in
the right direction, such as extending one of the existing standards.
Despite my criticsm, there are some great ideas in there, such as
featuring code lists and separating business rules from defining XML
structure. Ideally I would really want to see the best of all schema
validation engines merged into one some time in the future.

Lech