[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XSLT Architecture: Next Step
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 XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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