Re: XML/XSL on the client for dynamic UI

[zun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Olivier, everyone,

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999 oberthier@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Maybe to rephrase the idea, the flow of the application would be
> something like this:
> 
> 1. On the server, the XML data file is prepared from the content 
>    of several RDBMS table.
> 2. The user receives in its browser this XML document and a way
>    to render it.
> 3. The user then enters the data he wants into various fields
>    (each of them having its own validation and event handling,
>    for instance implemented in JavaScript if we keep the
>    browser idea). All those changes are automatically updating 
>    the XML document locally.
> 4. When finished, the user is submitting the updated XML data
>    back to the server which will update the database tables
>    accordingly.
> 
> My current interest is mainly on steps 2. and 3., 1. and 4.
> starting to be easy to address on an application server, or at
> least people are obviously working on it at the moment (see the
> recent XML server debate on this list).

I don't see any problems on doing 2 and 3 with XSLT.  The major roadblock
is that none of the major browsers have an up-to-date XSLT implementation
yet, but that can be circumvented by using it on the server side.

So for today, you'd have to do something like:

2. Server generates HTML+Javascript from XML data file using XSLT.

3. User enters data, Javascript posts back to server

The loss here is the transmission of the raw XML data in step 2.  But you
can rectify that by providing another URL for it on the server.

I'm not saying step 2 is easy mind you =)  If you want to work on the
Javascript code, I'll help with XSLT.  Definitely would be an interesting
project.

. . . Sean.




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