Re: XML as a programming tool

Mark Baker (markb@iosphere.net)
Fri, 19 Dec 1997 09:25:24 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> It has come as a revelation to me that XML *with its assorted toolkit* is a
> powerful programming aid for many applications.

Yes! It's part of a shift away from Turing completeness and towards
declarative programming.

Curiously enough, it's been approached from two different angles by two
different camps.

The Web/Hypertext camp has, to my knowledge, had this vision for ages.
But only recently has the distributed object camp been leaning in this
direction.

There's a project at PARC called "Aspect Oriented Programming", that's
attempting to evolve component software to widen the scope of interface
declarations (even beyond contracts). Basically, the many "aspects" of a
typical program are separated out into a minimal Turing complete core,
plus lots of declarative documents specifying such information as
concurrency, data flow, compositional structure, etc..). All of this is
run through a "weaver" to produce your end product.

http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/aop/

You might also be interested in a paper that Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare
have submitted to WWW7;

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/www/origin-of-species.html

Since this is a little off-topic, I'd recommend that any followups
be taken off-list. Then again, Peter did start it ... 8-)

MB

--
Mark Baker, Ottawa Ontario CANADA.                Java, CORBA, XML, Beans
http://www.iosphere.net/~markb               distobj@acm.org  ICQ:5100069


   Will distribute business objects for food.


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)