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ECMAScript Beefs Up Native XML Support

July 20, 2004 — GENEVA, Switzerland, GENEVA, Switzerland, July 20-- The Ecma General Assembly announced the release of ECMAScript for XML (E4X) as an international standard (ECMA-357). E4X is a vendor-neutral set of programming language extensions adding native XML support to ECMAScript (ECMA-262, or ISO/IEC 16262), indirectly one of the most widely used programming languages on the Web through its various 'implementations' such as JavaScript and Jscript.

E4X provides a standardized, DOM-like XML programming model that reuses familiar programming language concepts, such as operators and syntax for programmatically manipulating XML data which simplifies the work needed to create, manipulate or process XML data. The E4X standard was proposed in Ecma's programming languages Technical Committee (TC39) by a group of companies led by BEA in June 2002. The ECMAScript Task Group (TG1) of this committee immediately agreed and started drafting the specification. ECMA members BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Macromedia, Mozilla, Netscape/AOL and invited experts contributed to the development of the specification.

Commenting on the significance of the new XML standard, Carlo Innocenti, Stylus Studio's senior product architect said: "Sophisticated Web applications have for many years now employed XML for exchanging application data in a standard way, yet the applications themselves were until now, bound to a particular implementation language. The standardization of an XML processing API in the Web tier is a necessary first step in enabling looser coupling between code and external data, and are a foundation upon which to build support for more advanced XML features such as XML schema. E4X is a big improvement over previous methods for dealing with XML, and the huge industry interest surrounding its release is further indicative of the widespread adoption of XML technologies."

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Other XML Industry News Items:

• ECMAScript Beefs Up Native XML Support (July 20, 2004)
• Newly Released PHP 5.0 adds XML integration (July 14, 2004)
• W3C Releases Public Working Draft for Full-Text Searching of XML Text and XML Documents (July 12, 2004)
• Universal Business Language 1.0 (UBL) Approved OASIS Committee Draft (May 4, 2004)
• Microsoft Announces Mobile Device Profile for Web Services (May 3, 2004)
• Microsoft Releases Royalty Free XML Schemas for Office Visio 2003 (Apr. 16, 2004)
• Tim Berners-Lee Awarded Millennium Technology Award for Pioneering Work on Web (Apr. 15, 2004)