[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML-DEV and Interoperability (Re: Offtopic: Web Standards Pr
On Sun, 9 Aug 1998, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: [...] > - CORBA/Java. This is attractive for communities with well-established > informatics operations which wish to interoperate. A good example is > biology - all the major international and national genome and protein sites > are tooling up to provide CORBA-based services. XML is yet to surface. CML > and BSML are the only initiatives and they are relatively minor. The main > problem with CORBA is that there is a long learning curve. Moreover > interoperability is (I think) provided through fairly central global > coordination - the IDLs are agreed at international level and I suspect > that objects from a different domain will find it extremely difficult to > interoperate with Bio-objects and vice versa. [XML has an enormous > advantage here.] Yes, though it's easy to set up a false opposition here: using CORBA to interface with remote XML or RDF data stores is an attractive proposition. The DOM comes to mind, as do various proposals for markup based IDLs. The claim that XML enables decentralised development, avoiding committee bottlenecks for vocabulary creation, has a lot going for it. But as things stand with XML there's plenty of work yet to do on the creation of a framework that allows resource types defined in different domains to coexist and interact in a rich way, so there's a danger of overhyping XML here. There's plenty of scope for more runtime-smarts to be added to the CORBA environment too; I can't think of any developments in this area where new XML cross-domain clever tricks couldn't be echoed within a CORBA based framework. > Moreover very few people would happily author a document using CORBA-based > tools. I think I disagree here, but maybe am not sure what you mean. Could you expand on this? Would they be unhappy because CORBA-based interfaces are intrinsically unsettling (slow, proprietary, buggy???), because modelling the document in object/class terms rather as an element/attribute angle-bracketted textual tree is somehow less open and interoperable, or because it's not clear what final output of such a process would amount to (ie. what would the files look like?). Are you thinking of CORBA-based tools as something like OpenDoc(RIP), or like the Linux GNOME desktop project? I for one would be more than happy to use these, and to have my document stored without angle brackets using something like IronDoc (public domain descendent of bento/quilt work from the structured storage component of OpenDoc) and accessed via an IDL that offered .toXML() methods or a DOM interface... I can't really see an opposition between XML and CORBA in this sort of scenario. It all seems reassuringly complementary. > documents and vice versa. I'd be very grateful for any authoritative > statement on the relationship between UML and XML - I know there is > something, but how important is it? Not sure about XML in the general case, but for the RDF 'dialect', a discussion NOTE from Walter Chang of Adobe was published on the W3C site last week, discussing the relationship between UML and the RDF Schema language. Note that this is a member submission and not a Working Group publication, and that it focusses on the facilities in the first (may 98) public draft of RDF Schemas; future versions of the spec may differ. See http://www.w3.org/TR/ and search for 'UML' > An aside: I am relatively surprised how few academics there are on XML-DEV. > This is an area where (I would have thought) there is a lot of potential. I > haven't looked at the membership list but most seem to be *.com or *.net > (the latter are presumably individuals with a forbidden passion for XML > independent of their employment). Academia, though apparently powerless in > the face of commercial interests and lacking the resources for > shrink-wrapped development, must nevertheless make vital contributions to > new disciplines. Exactly. That's why University of Bristol signed up to W3C... Not so sure about 'vital' but I'd definitely encourage other academics[1] to get involved. Dan [1] does neglecting a Phd in favour of web hackery count as academic? ;-) -- Daniel.Brickley@b... Research and Development Unit tel: +44(0)117 9288478 Institute for Learning and Research Technology http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK. fax: +44(0)117 9288473 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/ 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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