XML integration

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Jul 15 16:39:00 EDT 2003


revolution at knowledgeworks.plus.com wrote:

> No it is not Mark that has a bee in his bonnet about XML, it is me :-)
> 
> The diff program I am using sees Rev stacks as binary files.  All it can tell
> me is that two binary files are indeed different; it can't show me where they
> differ.
> 
> This is one reason why I would like to be able to convert stacks into text.
> 
> I'm also very interested in being able to convert XML back into stacks.  It
> would effectively mean that one could externalize all the content of a stack.
> Say one decided to change the language in which an app was distributed - all
> the relevant terms would be there in clear text and could be easily extracted,
> translated, replaced, and then the XML re-converted back to a stack ready for
> building.  Heck, maybe even the building of the executable could be automated
> as part of this process.
> 
> It could also open up development to other environments.  Any tool that could
> edit or emit XML could also be a source for a Rev application.
> 
> That Geoff has done the foundation of this for Rev 1.1.1 shows it is doable.
> I am surprised that Runrev didn't take this up and run with it.
> 
> Or am I way off beam in seeing the potential in this?

The diff issue could be resolved by simpler and possibly more effective
means than XML.  Depending on what you want to do with the information it
could be formatted in any number of ways, and could be obtained more quickly
by running a comparison script against two stack files directly without the
intermediate step of writing XML versions of each.

As for using XML as a way to transfer files, it wouls be more efficient to
simply Base64 them for ASCII transfer.  So while I find the idea somewhat
attractive for posting object-dependent script examples, I'm hard-pressed to
find many other practical uses for it.

What would you use XML stak descriptions for?

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
 ___________________________________________________________
 Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com
 Tel: 323-225-3717                       AIM: FourthWorldInc




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