xsl-list
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [xsl] RE: Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?

2010-10-29 23:39:52
Hi Roger, All,

In all fairness, I need to add that for most of my XSLT work, Java is my favorite I/O environment and does support most forms of I/O, well enough, although some are missing that are becoming more and more important, forcing me to turn to other environments, and one of them is social-network interactive-3D virtual worlds.

Regards,
Andre




Hi Roger, All,

This is interesting.

For both minds and computers, everything is knowledge and information. There is really nothing else.

There are only two types of things that can be done with knowledge: sharing (I/O) and computing (typically to generate new knowledge).

The best tool (e.g. language) that we found, so far, to represent knowledge (and information, and data, and meta-data), for both computers and minds (e.g. humans), is XML.

XSLT is a computing tool which has just enough I/O (sharing abilities) (e.g. reading and writing XML) to connect with other systems where many of those systems have very specialized sharing (I/O) abilities.

Playing MIDI, displaying graphics, networking, database ACCESS, data acquisition, and so on, are all sharing (I/O) operations, each typically very specialized.

Whatever sharing channels are used, some computing is required somewhere along the line. That is where I use XSLT.

For example, XSLT is great for music, generating and managing complex structures (graphs, compositions). Written to XML they can easily be shared and understood by performance systems (e.g. MIDI).

The (e.g. music) things that I can do in XSLT (e.g. computing) I would not dare try them directly in something like MIDI systems (e.g. I/O).

Transforming knowledge structures from XML to MIDI performance, for example, is comparatively trivial and can easily be automated, often even in hardware.

It is good that some tools manage fancy I/O and it is great that other tools optimize computation and knowledge management. We need both. In fact it is probably why we have both: complex senses and minds. The key though is to have a common knowledge representation format (notation), with meta-data, between them (and us), hence XML.

In summary, for specialized sharing, I connect to optimized (I/O) tools, but for managing and computing knowledge, I really appreciate XSLT.

As a note, Java is interesting and it tries to do it all, but it is not very good or specialized at any. It can do some MIDI and it can compute to some degree. It is mostly very good at managing memory allocation, especially on the heap. As for processing knowledge structures, XSLT (with functional programming, streaming, parallelism, and XML) can teach it a few tricks.

Regards,
ac




Hi Folks,

I recently saw the following assertions. Can you help me refute them please:

(1) XSLT is a complete programming language, but doesn't support
     most things most developers need to do.  (Graphics, networking,
     relational database access, parsing HTTP headers, generating RSS
     feeds, peer-to-peer networking, memory management&  caching, thread
     management, MIDI programming, the list goes on and on and on).

(2) Java (and others) were also designed to be enterprise-class programming
     languages.  This means the assumption that many programmers will 
collaborate
     around a large project.  Encapsulation and complexity hiding are very 
important.
     A strongly typed, compiled language (not interpreted) is also important.
     In short, XSLT wasn't designed for "programming in the large".

/Roger

--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail:<mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--



--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail: <mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>