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RE: XSLT Architecture: Next Step

Subject: RE: XSLT Architecture: Next Step
From: Didier PH Martin <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 14:07:46 -0400
soap function call
Hi Claudio

Claudio said:
PS: What you said about "people doing all kinds of transforms" reminds me
more to a "middleware" approach. 

Didier replies:
You're on the right track Claudio. It is a kind of middleware, more
specifically a translator, an interpreter, a transformer and tutti quanti.
It's a strange beast able to perform different tasks on different languages'
instances (i.e. documents/messages/transactions)

As you know, XML is not a language per se but more a set of rules used to
created languages. The main advantage is that these produced languages share
a common syntax and therefore some generic tools can be used for an entire
family of languages. One of these generic tool is XSLT. 

You can use XSLT to change the elements' position (i.e. structure) of a
particular language instance (i.e. a document), reshuffle the attributes or
simply change the values. Thus one usage is to use XSLT to change a document
structure or its attributes/content values.

However, very often, XSLT is used as a tool use to translate from a
particular language into another particular language.

XSLT can also be used as an interpretation tool. The XSLT rules (i.e.
templates) can be perceived as interpretation rules. Thus applying XSLT
templates on an XML document is somehow like interpreting this document. For
instance, applying an XSLT stylesheet on a document to transform it into SVG
or HTML is to apply a certain interpretation on it. Using an XSLT stylesheet
to produce some javascript code is also an other kind of translation. Etc..
(note: see, XSLT can be used also to transform an XML based language into a
procedural language like for instance javascript, perl or python for our
friend Paul).

For data application integration people, XSLT can be perceived as a
translator used to transform a SOAP function call into an other SOAP
function call. For instance, the function post_amount(SWIFT_ID, account,
Description, clientID) marshaled into a SOAP format may be transformed using
an XSLT stylesheet to transform the function call into post_amount(SWIFT_ID,
account, Description) and, de facto, suppressing the last parameter to the
destination function call processor.

So, when I am thinking about languages like DSSSL or XSLT, both similar
functional languages, I think of them as:
- transformation tools
- language translators
- language interpreters

You know Claudio, XSLT is like the I elephant in the story, some see the
nose and think it's a hose, some see the legs and think they are columns,
but if you step back a little you can see the entire elephant and see that
it is a bit of all that.

Cheers,
Didier PH Martin
http://didier-martin.com



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