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RE: [xsl] object-oriented XSL


Subject: RE: [xsl] object-oriented XSL
From: "James Fuller" <james.fuller@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 21:36:09 +0100

links of interest

http://www.research.avayalabs.com/user/wadler/planx/

http://www.topxml.com/xsl/articles/fp/

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-SOX/

http://www.incrementaldevelopment.com/xsltrick/

I suspect your instincts are saying 'hey it can be done '....but this is
possibly counterintuitive.....XSLT has a place , especially XSLT 1.0. Now I
ain't railing against abusing any computer languages....they abuse me all
too often, but XSLT has already introduced a mixed processing model that
frankly I am getting comfortable with, and I see some real strengths to
having such a schizophrenic beast, also love to see things that were just
plain irratating to do in C++ become a breeze using a simple XSLT transform
with the added benefit of configuration management.

Dressing up XSLT in new clothes might be a neat thing to do....and deploying
an OO framework through a declaritive language might be possible.......but
asking people who are comfortable with Java and C++ programmers to use a
derived XSLT OO implementation, would be strange and an interesting
experiment, I suspect would end in low rates of adoption. It would be
interesting to see the markup crowd and html'ers 'catch on' to OO concepts,
but they can use javascript and PHP now if they wanna a little
polymorphism....

The fact is that procedural languages are good at some things, and
declarative languages are good at others, mixing them in a solution is great
fun and quite powerful if you can keep everything well behaved.

as I said in a past posts we may find ourselves turning into code farmers
planting genetic algorithm seeds.....a true black box; coding Mendelevs
cross breeding bits of billions of bits of meta data, very quickly in the
development of reasonable solutions.....our children will laugh at the
concept of OO then.


gl, jim fuller

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Mike Brown
> Sent: 21 August 2002 20:48
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [xsl] object-oriented XSL
>
>
> martin@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> > the idea is based on the concept of using XML as a programming language,
> > pretty much like XSL, but instead of a declarative, transform-focused
> > language it would be procedural, even object-oriented.
> > [...]
> > why not write the business logic, the bits that generate or process the
> > xml, in a programming language that gives you the same
> advantages as xslt?
>
> Some might say it is an advantage to have the fixed processing
> algorithm that
> a declarative, functional language imposes. The XSLT processing
> model is not
> very difficult to summarize:
>
>   - there's this input node tree representing the meat of an XML
> document,
>
>   - instructions in the best matching XSLT template for that
> tree's root node
>     are instantiated,
>
>   - various instructions result in the selection and processing of more
>     nodes, the observation of different parts of the input tree, and the
>     creation of a new output node tree,
>
>   - the new tree may be serialized in XML or HTML or plain text syntax
>     according to another fixed algorithm, guided by hints one provides
>     in the attributes of xsl:output and xsl:stylesheet elements.
>
> Although the nuances of XPath and XSLT require a complex machinery to
> implement this perfectly, an implementation can be fairly
> efficient since it
> can optimize without knowing very much about the stylesheet.
>
> And working within these confines still allows one great
> flexibility, as long
> as one is doing what XSLT was designed to do: 'XML
> transformation', or, more
> accurately, 'new XML document construction based on the content
> of 1 or more
> other XML documents'.
>
> However, I do think I see your point in that XSLT is relatively
> isolated from
> other languages, all being done in a black box, so to speak. I can see how
> some programmers, especially those entrenched in Java and C++,
> could feel more
> effective if they could do XSLT-like processing piecemeal, rather
> than having
> to give much thought to what business logic belongs where.
>
> Have you investigated OmniMark? I haven't really, and judging by
> their website
> I'd say some marketing types have recently been rebranding their
> development
> tools as a content management system/'solution', but my
> impression has been
> that it was the PL/SQL of XSLT...
>
> Anyway, I'm just rambling.
>
>    - Mike
> __________________________________________________________________
> __________
>   mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
>   denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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