Re: [xml-dev] An inquiry into the nature of XML and how it orients our p

[Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

Hi Roger,

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 5:46 PM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
> I oftentimes hear of people creating XML in an Object Oriented (OO) form, i.e., as classes and subclasses, or of people creating XML in a relational database form, i.e., as tables with rows and columns. I wonder if such forms are appropriate for XML? Does OO serve the same purpose as XML? Do relational tables serve the same purpose as XML?

I personally think, it's quite challanging to design (looks like too
much of an effort to me, for end user applications) an object oriented
system (let's say object's structure -- attribute and method
instances) modeled as XML document (instead we should use OO languages
for this :)). But certainly we write XSD Schemas, in OO fashion. I
would say, we sometimes design a particular domain type system, in OO
fashion. But I can't imagine, that usual real world XML instances can
easily be object oriented (I have not seen such an application design
commonly).

But ofcouse, we have systems which serialize OO system's, object state to XML.

> What are the consequences of constructing XML documents as a collection of classes and subclasses, or as tabular rows and columns?

Using XML documents to depict object state, and the user doing an
application design for this, looks like a big effort to me. I am not
sure, if such a design should be preferred. I have not commonly seen
this kind of program design. Some programming infrastructures (like
java for example), provide APIs to serialize object state, to XML (but
that's an infrastructure service, and not an application design).

Imagining XML documents, as tabular rows and columns I think, is yet
another application data model (and I think, it's used much in
application design). Of course, I think there are many other XML
instance models possible (depicted by so many kinds of XML Schema's,
that already exist, and those that are yet to be written).

> Do we destroy the beauty of XML?

I don't think so. If we make use of XML to model an OO instance, I
think that would just be another use of XML :)



-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi