Keywords: Application architecture, Authoring, Browser, Design, DOM, Enterprise applications, Functional Programming, HTML, Internet, Java, JavaScript, Middleware, Mobile, Namespaces, Query language, Schema, Search, XHTML, XML, XPath, XQuery, XSL-FO, XSLT
Biography
John Schneider is a founder and Chief Technology Officer at AgileDelta, Inc., an independent software vendor that supplies XML and Web Services infrastructure software for use on mobile computing platforms.Prior to founding AgileDelta, Mr. Schneider led Engineering and Program Management for Crossgain Corporation, a high profile Microsoft spin-off founded to radically simplify building and deploying web services and applications (sold to BEA). He was also Principal Systems Engineer at MITRE where he kick-started and led a variety of international XML initiatives for the United States and NATO. Mr. Schneider founded and is leading ECMA's ECMAScript for XML (E4X) group, which is developing the first mainstream XML programming language and has active participation from Microsoft, BEA, IBM, MacroMedia, RIM and others. He helped develop the XML Query Language and the XML Schema Language. He was a U.S. delegate to NATO on technology initiatives related to XML, messaging, data interoperability and integrated business processes. Mr. Schneider has twenty years experience developing technology with a focus on mobile technologies, data encoding, information management, data interoperability and messaging. He has a Masters degree and Bachelors degree in Computer Science.
Developing software to create, navigate and manipulate XML data has become a significant part of almost every developer's job. Developers are inundated with a wide variety of data encoded in XML, including web pages, web services, deployment descriptors, configuration files, project make files and a variety of XML vocabularies for vertical industries (from purchase orders to target lists).
Unfortunately, current XML processing techniques require developers to learn and master a complex array of new concepts and programming techniques. XML programming models often seem heavyweight, cumbersome and unfamiliar for the average developer. Therefore, reading, writing and maintaining XML code can be tedious, time consuming and error prone requiring a heap of reference manuals and a large technology stack.
ECMAScript for XML (E4X) was recently approved as an international standard (ECMA-357) with broad industry support from companies including Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Macromedia, Mozilla, RIM, and Palm. E4X extends the JavaScript object model with native support for XML data. It reuses familiar JavaScript operators for creating, navigating and manipulating XML, such that anyone who has used JavaScript is able to start using XML with little or no additional knowledge. The extensions include native XML data types, XML literals (i.e., initializers) and a small set of new operators useful for common XML operations, such as searching and filtering.
Authoring applications with E4X has a number of advantages. Applications written with E4X are smaller and more intuitive to the average developer than comparable XSLT or DOM applications. They are easier to read, write and maintain requiring less developer time, skill and specialized knowledge. The net result is reduced code complexity, tighter revision cycles and shorter time to market for network applications. In addition, E4X is a lighter weight technology useful for developing applications on a broad range of computing platforms from large-scale servers to mobile devices.
This presentation will give an overview of E4X, motivate its use in applications, and provide a live demonstration of E4X code using a preview of the Mozilla open source implementation.
Since this talk was waitlisted, no paper was prepared for the proceedings.
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