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Re: Partitioning?

• To: Didier PH Martin <martind@n...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Partitioning?
• From: Steven Noels <stevenn@o...>
• Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 23:36:32 +0200
• Organization: Outerthought
• References: <000001c23652$cea25b00$6401a8c0@didierhome>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530

Didier PH Martin wrote:

> Off course not but this is not part of the actual offering. You'll have
> to develop that yourself and maybe to modify the existing code if you
> want to inject the stylesheet processing instruction in the XML document
> sent to the user agent. Bottom line, it is not there yet, at least in
> the case of Cocoon. And based on the very few answers I got on this
> topic, it seems that this is not common practice if not a practice not
> used at all.

Well, Cocoon2 is the re-architecturing of Cocoon1 precisely because of 
the bad-practice of including a stylesheet reference in a 'source' XML 
document, since it precludes easy republication of that file across 
different media, using different stylesheets.

That being said, I guess I'm not necessarily agreeing with your 
definition of 'the actual offering'. If you have an XML source document 
starting like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="foobar.xsl"?>

and some foobar.xsl stylesheet stored on the server, the following 
sitemap fragment will do what you want IMO:

       <map:match pattern="**.xml">
         <map:generate src="{1}.xml"/>
         <map:select type="browser">
           <map:when test="ie6">
             <map:serialize type="xml"/>
           </map:when>
           <map:otherwise>
             <map:transform src="foobar.xsl"/>
             <map:serialize type="html"/>
           </map:otherwise>
         </map:select>
       </map:match>
       <map:match pattern="**.xsl">
         <map:read mime-type="text/xsl" src="{1}.xsl"/>
       </map:match>

Hm. You'll be flaming me for the foobar.xsl in the sitemap 
configuration, not? We are just discussing 'pipeline-aware' 
actions/selectors/matchers in the Cocoon-community, which would enable 
you to eradicate this annoyance, too: the transformer would be 
configured using information found inside the SAX-stream being passed 
across the processing pipeline, i.e. the stylesheet reference. It is a 
very touchy area however, since lots of people find this breaks the 
Separation of Concerns pattern on which Cocoon2 has been build.

> Didier replies:
> In practice the transformation engine server is itself an HTTP server
> sitting in front of the farm (or is a farm of transformation servers).
> The front end servers receives the requests and get the XML documents
> from back end HTTP servers. This allows you to perform two load balance.
> I made these test in Didier's labs and was amazed to see the improved
> performance. I was amazed also to discover the lack of sophistication of
> the actual XML server offerings. It seems that the demand is not big
> enough to drive innovation in this industry.

You are saying retrieving (static) XML docs across the network is faster 
than fetching them from local disk? I don't get that one. If you 
consider actual XML server offerings being unsophisticated, I doubt it 
whether you have Cocoon a real close look - a lot of people are argueing 
it is too complex for mundane beings ;-)

<snip/>

> It seems that the XML community is internally focused and more concerned
> by URIs than by having a good architecture out there in the real field
> to prove that content/rendering separation is the right thing to do.
> Instead the community felt into Byzantine discussions. I guess that it
> is a sign that we crossed the chasm, that not all the XML technology is
> used in reality. It simply history repeating itself :-)

In the start of my career, I have been working 'purely' with SGML/XML 
for 6 years - being a true dochead and all of it. Standards were 
everything to me. Implementations were evaluated more in terms of their 
compliancy rather than in terms of the offered functionality. After 
that, I moved to the 'Internet industry', where people wanted actual 
applications to be built which made practical use of XML and the like. I 
never learned so much about XML in those past 4 years :-)

Regards,
</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
stevenn@o...                      stevenn@a...

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