[E-Lang] Draft Kernel-E DTD & Sketch of translation to debuggable Java

[Dan Moniz]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark S Miller <markm@caplet.com> writes:

    Mark> * To debug subsystems that uses Java Object Serialization Streams,
    Mark> such as the in-progress revamping of the old "proxy comm" system.
    Mark> I've looked on the web, and I *can't believe* that no one's written a
    Mark> program to parse a JOSS stream it order to print an equivalent
    Mark> textual description, and that no one's written something to take such
    Mark> a textual description and generate a JOSS. However, I've looked on
    Mark> the web and couldn't find anything. Given today's fads, the natural
    Mark> thing to do is define a DTD for the JOSS format, and write converters
    Mark> from JOSS into this XML, and vice versa. If Javasoft had done this a
    Mark> year ago, we would probably not be hearing about XML-RPC or SOAP
    Mark> today.

Perhaps, but JOSS is Java specific at one end, at least. Userland made XML-RPC
because they were dealing with a Java-less world powered primarily C and Perl,
if memory serves. SOAP was a collaboration between Documentor, Userland, and
Microsoft (at least in the beginning), and I don't see MS pushing anything Java
these days, not even J++ or MSJVM.

<mini-rant>
I recently attended a level 200 MS seminar on building Web Services with SOAP
in Toronto a few weeks ago and was A) stricken by the lack of technical detail,
but more importantly B) amused by the initial apologetics the presenter shared
then proceeded to show SOAP, but focused on MS' ROPE (Remote Object Proxy
Engine -- wtf does this mean), which essentially was a VB control that allowed
you to plug in, very easily, lightweight SOAP message construction and parsing
using the ROPE 'object'.

The kicker was that the presenter made the comment that SOAP doesn't support
large sets of data, a la databases, and that although SOAP is free, you would
have to buy MS BizTalk to get the large data set support. Someone equally not
fooled as myself managed to beat me to the punch by saying that SOAP itself
supports arbitrary data sizes, large or small, database or no. The presenter
quickly backpedeled and said he meant that the ROPE tool didn't support large
data sets, although the SOAP standard does.
</mini-rant>

    Mark> Does anyone have any opinions of MinML
    Mark> http://wilson.co.uk/xml/minml.htm , a vastly smaller XML parser than
    Mark> the "standard" stuff (like Apache's Xerces or Sun's Project-x)? Are
    Mark> there other reasonable small open-source parsers or dom-tree classes
    Mark> out there?

Some of the more XML-centric people I deal with rely on libxml as the XML swiss
army parsing chainsaw, but they're working under Linux at the moment, and I
don't know how portable the code is. There's also the SML (Simplifed Markup
Language?) project, which is attempting to make a lightweight version of XML;
perhaps that may have some tools of use (I haven't looked at minml yet, but
I'll do so now).


-- 
Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]