[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Objectifying XML - JavaScript Extensions for XML (E4X) - Comments?
Hello, allow me to highlight the blog story tilted "Objectifying XML - E4X for Firefox 1.1" by Kurt Cagle. Kurt writes: Sometimes it's the little things that catch you by surprise. Deep within the list of the various new features appearing within Firefox 1.1, there was a short one liner about a new extension to Javascript called E4X. I was kind of curious about this, given that there was very little else that I could uncover about this, but it turns out the E4X is shorthand for ECMAScript for XML, a language extension proposed to the ECMA late last summer. The principle behind E4X is simple, but very profound. Currently, Javascript is rather stupid about XML - if you want to manipulate XML, you have to create a set of interfaces and use the W3C DOM and frequently some VERY painful treewalking or convoluted XPath calls in order to be able to do anything with it. I've long wished that there was a simpler mechanism for working with XML, especially as web development code is increasingly moving to an XML basis. E4X does precisely this. It lets Javascript treat XML as a native application type in exactly the same way that Javascript handles strings, numbers and regular expressions. However, if this was all that E4X did, it'd be not much more useful than DOM. Howevever, the other aspect of E4X, the one that is most interesting, is the fact that it "objectifies" XML. In other words, it lets you convert an XML document into a representation of an object, without having to go through the long, involved steps involved in working with DOM. More @ http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/06/objectifying_xm.html What's your take? Do you see any need for adding XML as a native type to scripting or programming languages or are existing APIs such as DOM, SAX & friends good enough? Has anyone used E4X already and care to share your experience? - Gerald PS: IBM has published an article on E4X titled "AJAX and scripting Web services with E4X" online @ http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-ajax1 _______________________________________________________________ Vancouver XML Developers Association (VanX) - http://vanx.org
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