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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Groves, the next big thing (Re: ANN: XML and Databases article)
 >Groves are going to turn out to be like Linux, which began with a very >few people who had a vision that turned out to work. I'll start by making it clear that I've been on the W3C DOM working group for more than two years, so you know where my biases lie ... Nevertheless, I speak as someone who has spent a fair amount of time wrestling with defining abstract data models and APIs for XML documents and considering what the grove paradigm offers. There are three basic reasons why the DOM is not more groves-like. First, as someone pointed on earlier in the "XML and Databases" thread, not enough people outside the hard-core SGML/XML community understand the groves paradigm, so there was no general familiarity that we felt we should leverage. Second, the available documentation for groves (at least a couple of years ago) was mainly the DSSSL spec, which is very difficult for non-specialists to make sense out of. Third, there was a widespread perception that the groves model implies, in DOM terms, that "every character is a node", and people concerned about implementing the DOM API felt strongly that this would lead to unacceptable footprint and run-time overhead. Groves may or may not become the next Linux; if this is going to happen, two obstacles must be overcome. Most importantly, someone is going to have to write a *clear* statement of the paradigm, its power, why it's "the next big thing, etc. Sortof "Groves for Dummies", or the "Grove Manifesto". I can't stress enough the importance of writing this for a fairly general audience. I recall conversations a couple of years ago with very smart technical marketing people at large companies who are now big players in the XML world; the level of fustration they expressed at trying to make sense out of things like the DSSSL spec was quite memorable! I have not read the recent attempts by groves adovocates to offer tutorials, etc., so forgive me if this has already been done. I frankly doubt it, because if a clear and compelling case for the groves paradigm has been made, it hasn't come to the world's attention. Also, even if the "grove paradigm" is a fundamentally more powerful way of looking at XML and other types of data than what is in wide use today, it's unlikely to be adopted unless there is a clean migration path from familiar APIs like ODBC/SQL, the W3C DOM, the (forthcoming?) JCP XML data binding spec, etc. One of the most eye-opening aspects of my experience on the DOM WG has been to understand that most users of Web scripting languages, Visual Basic, etc. know very little about computer science. I began my DOM "career" assuming that everyone who would be using such APIs understood tree and graph data structures and would understand how nicely they represented the types of things we were talking about. I was quickly set straight by my colleagues from companies with larger customer bases: ARRAYS are about as sophisticated a data structure as the typical Web scripter or VB programmer can handle. [I *know* that someone reading this wants flame me, but rest assured that I don't like this notion any more than you do, and just about every conceivable counter-argument has been raised, and very reluctantly dismissed, by the DOM WG already.] So, I would *love* to see someone define a grove API that extends the DOM, and/or to see the grove paradigm cleanly incorporated into the Java Community Process XML data binding, and/or to see a repository-friendly API that builds from ADO or JDO and incorporates groves concepts. But don't expect the typical consumer of XML APIs to be impressed by a groves API that offers a "new paradigm" that assumes that the reader understands graph theory and data structures and builds up from there with little reference to existing efforts. Mike Champion xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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