XML as a programming tool

[Mark Baker]

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 at acm.org  ICQ:5100069

   Will distribute business objects for food.

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