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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The Power of Groves
 At 12:50 AM 2/11/00 -0600, Steve Schafer wrote: >Where I'm coming from: > >Unlike Peter and probably most of the others participating in this >discussion, I'm actually very comfortable discussing all of this in >abstract terms. (Perhaps it's because I'm a physicist by training--I >don't know.) And I do strongly feel that looking at the abstract >picture is the way to understand precisely where any deficiencies may >lie. Excellent. We need more people like you! >We need to make this stuff accessbile, but first we need to make it >work. I'm an experienced software developer; I've written parsers, >interpreters, sophisticated text and graphics rendering engines, etc. >Complex modeling and programming issues don't scare me. What scares me >is the possibility that I'm going to embark on a major journey using >groves as a fundamental data abstraction for a very large project, and >then a year from now I'm going to hit a brick wall because of some >unforeseen deficiency. What we also need is a critical mass of people who believe enough to make it happen - by writing systems that are abstract enough and generic enough and useful enough that they self-replicate. Eliot tried very hard to respond to this by writing Phyllis. I believe in Eliot's vision (and his co-believers). But until there is a tool which solves a sufficient number of my problems quickly, I will probably flounder along by writing ad hoc solutions for each problem. To take an example - I have written a set of Java classes to support a DOM in CML. I was surprised how much effort it was. I found myself writing a class for each element and an interface for each attribute. [Note, these classes often have to do chemistry things, so *some* code has to be written.] But I felt that there was a lot of coding that should have been automatic from the DTD [I know that there are Beanmaker approaches to this but they didn't quite seem to fit.] When Schemas are finalised I am sure we shall need this sort of stuff routinely. At that time we need a fairly small number of approaches so that we can make the investment to learn the technology - like we have for SAX and DOM. P. 
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