Jelly/o:XML

[Ken McCloskey <ke...@hotmail.com>]

Thanks for all who responded to my previous post on Jelly.

My search for an "XML language" comes from increasingly running into walls 
with Ant when trying to do seemingly reasonable things (such as being able 
to a parameterize a target or the ability to use a list of items as input to 
a task). Without such features, I've resorted to using XSLT to generate Ant 
build scripts with alot of redudant-looking targets.

o:XML seems to do alot of what Jelly does and while it didn't work 
out-of-the-box, it only took about a half hour to become functional in it. 
And it's database extensions are the most terse example of going from SQL to 
XML I've seen.

Transformational languages are going to be extremely important. If 
Microsoft's X# language comes out without a serious Java alternative, I 
could see an erosion of market share.

Finally, I just wanted to say thanks to all the people who contribute to 
Jakarta, your hard work has made my job easier and more productive in many 
ways.

Ken

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Re: Jelly/o:XML

[Bill Keese <bi...@tech.beacon-it.co.jp>]

> o:XML seems to do alot of what Jelly does and ...

Wow, there are a million different XML scripting languages out there,
apparently.

Thanks for the pointer on this language.  Reading the manual of o:XML
(http://www.o-xml.org/objectbox/), it seems pretty cool.  It is written in
the spirit of XSLT in that, basically, the only variable type is XML, and
XPATH can be used anywhere.   With Jelly, in contrast, outside of the XML
library there seems to be no special support for variables containing XML.
Thus, for example, you can't directly specify an X-Path expression as an
input to a function

  <myFunction arg1="$myDoc/foo/bar">

nor can you specify an X-Path expression as input to a choose statement:

  <j:choose>
     <j:when test="$myDoc/foo/bar = $myDoc2/foo/bar">
   ...
etc.

(Also, note that while some Jelly tags take Documents as input, the XML
library outputs Lists and Elements, which are almost but not quite the same
as Documents.)

On the other hand, Jelly supports all the variable types of java (String,
File, Document, etc.).
So I guess that Jelly is a general purpose scripting language whereas o:XML
is for those operating solely in the XML world.

The strong point of Jelly is all the built-in libraries.  You can make HTTP
calls, write/read files, send e-mail, make soap-calls, or do multi-threading
all out of the box (more or less).  With o:XML you can reference java
classes and you can define your own tags (procedures), but it's a bit of a
hassle.  And, certain things, such as spawning multiple threads, appear to
be impossible in o:XML.

Bill

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken McCloskey" <ke...@hotmail.com>
To: <co...@jakarta.apache.org>
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 3:48 AM
Subject: Jelly/o:XML


> Thanks for all who responded to my previous post on Jelly.
>
> My search for an "XML language" comes from increasingly running into walls
> with Ant when trying to do seemingly reasonable things (such as being able
> to a parameterize a target or the ability to use a list of items as input
to
> a task). Without such features, I've resorted to using XSLT to generate
Ant
> build scripts with alot of redudant-looking targets.
>
> o:XML seems to do alot of what Jelly does and while it didn't work
> out-of-the-box, it only took about a half hour to become functional in it.
> And it's database extensions are the most terse example of going from SQL
to
> XML I've seen.
>
> Transformational languages are going to be extremely important. If
> Microsoft's X# language comes out without a serious Java alternative, I
> could see an erosion of market share.
>
> Finally, I just wanted to say thanks to all the people who contribute to
> Jakarta, your hard work has made my job easier and more productive in many
> ways.
>
> Ken
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
>
>
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