XSA proposal

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
>
>This is a proposal for XML Software Autoupdate, a system for
>automatically keeping track of new releases of software products.

* Tim Bray
>
>Isn't this what OSD, from MS & Marimba, is supposed to do? 

Yes, in a sense. However, XSA concerns itself with discovering
new versions and changed addresses, while OSD goes much further,
and omits some of the most useful parts of XSA.

Compare the example below from the OSD spec with the XSA sample 
and I think you'll see what I mean. I looked at OSD before I
started this, but skipped it as it simply wasn't suitable for
my purposes.

<SOFTPKG NAME="com.foobar.www.Solitaire" VERSION="1,0,0,0">
    <TITLE>Solitaire</TITLE>
    <ABSTRACT>Solitaire by FooBar Corporation</ABSTRACT>
    <LICENSE HREF="http://www.foobar.com/solitaire/license.html" />
    
    <!--FooBar Solitaire is implemented in native code for Win32, 
         Java code for other platforms -->
    <IMPLEMENTATION>
        <OS VALUE="WinNT"><OSVERSION VALUE="4,0,0,0"/></OS>
        <OS VALUE="Win95"/>
        <PROCESSOR VALUE="x86" />
        <LANGUAGE VALUE="en" />
        <CODEBASE HREF="http://www.foobar.org/solitaire.cab" />
    </IMPLEMENTATION>
    
    <IMPLEMENTATION>
        <IMPLTYPE VALUE="Java" />
        <CODEBASE HREF="http://www.foobar.org/solitaire.jar" />
            
        <!-- The Java implementation needs the DeckOfCards object -->
        <DEPENDENCY>
            <CODEBASE HREF="http://www.foobar.org/cards.osd" />
        </DEPENDENCY>
    </IMPLEMENTATION>
</SOFTPKG>

--Lars M.


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)