Re: RDF API convergence? was Re: ANNOUNCE: RDF.NET

Hello

> There are two approaches to defining API's.  One is to define
> a language independent API in an IDL and have multiple language
> bindings.  This is the approach taken by DOM.

I thrown IDL in the discussion because I was just thinking about
defining the API software
boundaries and decoupling the API model from the actual implementation.
I do not like fat CORBA things in general, but at least IDL is really
good to design a
good set of interfaces in a language independent way. IMHO have a Java
or Phyton object model
it would be too specific to be widely implemented.

> The other is to have a common programming model then
> define an API for each language that best represents that
> model in that language.  This is what JDom has done for Java
> and is the basis for the approach I took with Jena.

Yep!
In RDFStore, I am on the way to implement a Perl TIE interface over an
local or remote RDF storage.
I.e. a Perl script could access (read/write/query) transparently
triplets directly using familiar Perl  operators
without getting stuck with OO constructs.
Such a simple approach could be easily implemented in JavaScript too to
be run on the client side
in a Web browser.
I think Jonas Liljegren is aiming to do something similar with WRAF, and
using the Perl TIE approach it
would let the user dive into it much more quickly :-)


Alberto