Dissillusioned about interoperability.

[Stacy Whitney]

Another general translator is available -- GENTRAN from Sterling
Commerce.  This product has a GUI mapper that lets you 
'link' from someone else's data representation to your own
(and vice versa).  It understands DTDs, and can build a basic
map structure for one side of a mapping from a DTD file.
It can translate between XML, positional, and EDI syntaxes
(I may be leaving a few out.)  

GENTRAN's XML support is currently on the NT platform, 
with plans to migrate it to our other GENTRAN platforms.
You can find information on the GENTRAN products on the
NT platform at http://www.stercomm.com/pdsv/ploc/gent/wnnt.html

-Stacy


-----Original Message-----
From:	Simon St.Laurent [SMTP:simonstl at simonstl.com]
Sent:	Thursday, October 07, 1999 8:45 PM
To:	Kent Sievers; xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Subject:	Re: Dissillusioned about interoperability.



At 05:13 PM 10/7/99 -0600, Kent Sievers wrote:
>A tool like, say, a markup language other than XML?  One that only had one
>way to mark up a simple name/value pair?  That is what we left behind.

We haven't left anything behind yet, not by a long run.  What I'm talking
about is a tool that would let you map:

everybody else's damn structures -> my structures

where you'd set things up so that you could create mappings one time, and
then your processor could identify incoming structures and map them to what
_you_ want.

If you only want name/value pairs structured one way, that's fine.

You can do this kind of work with transformations like XSLT and
architectural forms.  What I haven't seen so far is something that lets
people take 'random' XML documents and say 'make it look like this' in a
general way without requiring major pain and suffering, which I suspect is
the root of your disillusionment.  Even if such a tool only handled simple
cases, it could do a lot of good if it had a reasonable interface and easy
automation.

Mike Hatalski pointed out IBM's XML Translator Generator - it's one option,
though I'd like to see it given a prettier face.
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/techmain/5F60964153C427478825677600681
7AA

I'm not ready to force the world into a single model for name-value pairs,
sorry.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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