[ANN] Candle 0.9.1 Beta Release - a new scripting language for XML and m

[henryluo@candlescript.org]

Dear members of xml-dev list,

I'm glad to announce the 0.9.1 beta release of Candle
(Common ApplicatioN Development
LanguagE).
 Candle is an open-source (MPL) scripting language that unifies the core
 features of many XML-related technologies (including XSLT, XQuery,
XQuery Update, RELAX NG, BNF, XHTML, SVG and more). It can be used to
develop command-line, desktop and Internet applications.

Some of the advantages of Candle comparing to XSLT and XQuery are:

• Candle is an unified language instead of two highly-overlapping languages. Candle uses scripting syntax instead of the highly verbose markup syntax of XSLT.
• Candle's markup language is strongly-typed even without schema, whereas XML is only weakly-typed without schema.
• Candle consists of a pattern language which cleanly unifies several pattern-related DSLs (including RegEx, BNF, RELAX NG, XQuery Sequence Type). It can easily match on sequence of items, nodes and characters.
• Candle unifies functional and procedural programming. Through a mechanism I called separation-of-side-effects, Candle unifies two worlds in a more orderly manner then any existing multi-paradigm programming languages. In Candle, routines are divided into functions and methods. Functions are routines without side-effects and methods are routines with side-effects. The rule of separation-of-side-effects is that methods can call functions, but not vice versa. And expressions in Candle are always functional. In this way, pure functional islands are well-preserved in the vast sea of procedural code.
• Candle is a general-purpose scripting language like Python, whereas XSLT and XQuery are just DSLs. Candle alone is sufficient to develop complex command-line, desktop and Internet applications, whereas XSLT and XQuery still need to integrate with other languages to develop a serious application.

For more information, you can visit the website (http://www.candlescript.org/) or the SourceForge project.

You can also read two blog articles Why I Invented Candle (I) and Why I Invented Candle (II) to understand the design rationales behind Candle.

Your feedback on Candle is highly appreciated. I'm here anxiously waiting.

Henry

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Candle App Platform - An unified platform for desktop and Internet apps.