Simplified XML Programming using Water

When: 
Thursday, February 21, 2002 - 6:45pm
Lecturer(s): 
Christopher Fry and Mike Plusch
Christopher Fry
Mike Plusch

There are tools for creating an XML API to an existing service, but it is still very complex to create a new service from other XML services. Using Java to create an XML web service is like building a Java application using C libraries. It's possible -- just not very natural. The talk will demonstrate ways to use an XML-Native approach to simplify programming XML and explain how to solve some key problems when using XML for remote calls (RPC). solution to the Attribute vs. Element problem

  • eliminate the mapping problem between XML and a programming language
  • eliminate the ambiguity and incompleteness of schema languages
  • eliminate the verbosity of XML 1.0 with Concise XML
  • show a full XML development environment including debugging

We extended XML to handle general programming, allowing you to program web services in XML. Water is a general purpose object oriented programming language that has an XML syntax. Its "DOM" is the same as the object system of the language -- eliminating the need for XML API's. Storing dynamic data in XML becomes trivial as does defining new "active" elements.