Re: What is XProc? Is it ...

"Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org> writes:
> What is XProc? Is it:
>
> (a) A general utility for defining XML pipelines
>
> (b) An XML data flow language
>
> (c) An XML-based workflow language
>
> (d) An XML-based orchestration language
>
> (e) An XML-based process definition language

It's all of the above, though I think it's more immediately suited for
things closer to (a) than for things closer to (e).

Because it's fairly general purpose and extensible, it's difficult to
say there are things it can't do. It just isn't designed to make doing
them easy.

I almost commented, for example, on the BPEL comparison. It's true
that none of the existing steps can "interact with people". But I
could write a "wait for Joe in accounting to approve this PO"
extension step that used email or XForms or SMS messages or whatever
and then I could tune my XProc engine to run for long periods of time
and then XProc would be able to "interact with people". That just
wasn't a design goal.

When I'm asked, I say XProc is a language for composing XML
technologies: parsing, validation, XInclude, query, transformation,
etc. Or words to that effect.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | The perfect man has no method; or
http://nwalsh.com/            | rather the best of methods, which is
                              | the method of no-method.-- Shih-T'ao