Alex Clark wrote:
What is the best way to move forward on this standard?
Of course, my response is EXPath ;-)
EXPath is a project dedicated at defining extensions in an
implementation-independent way. The main means to doing so is to
define XPath functions, so they can be implemented (and used) for
XSLT, XQuery, XProc, XPath, XForms, etc.
There are also attempts to define other kinds of tools, like a
packaging system for several XML-related technologies, and a
servlet-like specification to write web applications in XSLT,
XQuery and/or XProc.
My approach to building web services libraries in XSLT is to
use the EXPath HTTP Client extension (which provides the function
http:send-request() to perform HTTP requests). I have a draft
library which implements for instance some Google APIs (for their
documents, contacts and other services). It is written in plain
XSLT, using the HTTP Client as the only extension to actually
perform the HTTP requests (actually the goal is to write them in
a subset of XSLT so they could be automatically translated to
XQuery libraries as well).
I have also written a web application (based on the above-
described webapp framework) to backup some Google Servcies data.
It simply uses those Google APIs written in XSLT to access the
Google services.
By using such "standard" extensions, the library (or webapp)
author ensure his/her libraries/webapps are not bound to any
specific processor. The key here is of course to what extent
those extensions will be adopted by vendors. But there are signs
they are in good position (hopefully :-)).
More information in XML Prague next week!
If you want to read more about the project: http://expath.org/
and if you want to discuss further: http://expath.org/lists.html.
Regards,
--
Florent Georges
http://www.fgeorges.org/
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