XProc / xml piplining / xml interop

the main drawback of xml processing / "xml pipelining" is the lack of any standardisation in this area.

there are already lots of implementation out there (see http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/27/xmlProcModel) but most of them are more or less spike solutions or vendor driven island.

in my point of view the most interessting approach is XPL (http://www.w3.org/Submission/2005/SUBM-xpl-20050411/). reference implementation is available within orbeon presentation server (www.orbeon.com). not worth to take a look at.....

i wonder what does slow down the process of standardisation? main reason is that this topic is somehow underestimated. as already mentioned it covers the missing piece of the puzzel xml interop.

there are many useful xml processing standards already available:

- xslt (http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/)

- XQuery (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/)

- XUpdate (http://www.smb-tec.com/xmldb/xupdate/index.html)

- DOM (http://www.w3.org/DOM/)/ SAX (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_API_for_XML) and corresponding implementations in several programming languages

- WSDL (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl)

- ....

but there is no standard describing the orchestra of these components. because each of those standards are functional components must be assambled to get a application.

thus leads to many different approaches to build up xml based applications, each of them are less more or less sufficient but non of them can be exchanged with each other or in other words non platform can extend an application developed based on a different platform.

xml pipelining can break down this limitation using same approach as unix pipes provides for bytes streams but on a higher level of abstraction (means xml provides more semantic than byte stream provides).

hopefully XProc succeed in terms of time and penetration....

alex

Process Management System

today is stumble accross INTALIO and their Process Management System (bpms) through a post in Orbeon mailing list.

they relaunching their product suite as open source contribution which not worth to take a look into if you talking about buisness integration.

as assigned on their web side they implemented WS-BPEL 2.0 and BPEL4WS 1.1.

new platform (especially the open source edition) currently just announced but i'm very curious about the outcoming.....


alex

TRENT: definition

what does TRENT reallly means. TRansform conTENT into value. nice marketing slang ..... but if you have to deal with information processing that is the main goal your are faced with.

content creation, content storage, content retrieval, content publishing but its all about the value the content provides to a particular actor.

content more general can be specified as an information object valid in a certain context. to be more concrete this means that a given word / information object "red" is only content if it is assigned as a property to a object "car" which specifies the context of this object.

to standardise content processing XML must be considered as a conceptional abstruction to describe and access information objects. XML provides a unique and reusable way how to process / access content.

therefore TRENT is all about XML processing or technology derived / extent XML processing technologies.

because information processing also means to orchestra more than one certain operation on the content you also have to think about an conceptional solution for assembly many dedicated processing calls to information objects.

thus problems can be addressed with well-known pipelining approach which in our case ends up in xml pipelining approach.

thus means

- TRENT is all about transformation of content

- transformation of content is all about pipelining

- content is all about XML

- TRENT is all about XML processing using xml pipelining


Alex