Re: [xsl] Declarative Web Applications: A Modern Architecture

["Roger L Costello costello@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Martynas,
Thank youbthatbs a very insightful extension of the ideas.
Your point about RDF being bweb-native,b with URIs as first-class
identifiers, is particularly interesting. The idea that the request URI can
directly correspond to the entity identifierband effectively collapse or
flatten the controller layer in MVCbis a powerful architectural
simplification.
I also found your formulation of:
Webpage = Transformation(Projection(Dataset))
very compelling. It aligns closely with what I was trying to express, but in a
more distilled form. It makes explicit that a large class of web applications
can be understood as selecting a subset of data and transforming it into a
representation.
After reading your posts, what stood out to me is the shift from code-centric
to data-centric architecture. In your model, business logicbmodels, rules,
constraintsbmoves into the data layer, and the application becomes a more
generic processing engine. That seems like a natural extension of the
declarative approach I was describing.
In my paper, I focused on keeping the HTTP layer thin and moving orchestration
and transformation into declarative artifacts. Your approach goes a step
further by making the data model itself (RDF) the primary organizing
structure, with URIs providing a direct link between the web and the data.
Thatbs a very elegant way of reducing architectural complexity.
Itbs also interesting that XSLT still plays a role in your stack, even with
a graph-based model underneath. That reinforces the idea that the projection +
transformation pattern is quite general and not tied to a particular data
model.
Thanks again for sharing thisbitbs a very useful perspective, and it
definitely broadens the discussion beyond XML into a more general data-driven
architecture.
Best,
Roger