[REBOL] Re: Interesting Article on repurposing software
From: mfontana7:inwind:it at: 28-Oct-2003 21:26
> bic> why do you think that Rebol could be really good at this (really
> bic> good implying to me better than at other things, and better than
> bic> other tools)?
>
> 1) It's designed to enable communication (the semantic exchange of
> information).
>
> 2) It has a friendly native format that is easy to load and generate.
>
> 3) We can build formatting dialects for various targets; think VID.
>
> 4) PARSE
>
> 5) It's easy to generate data in various formats.
>
> 6) EasyVID, make-doc, PDF-maker, ML, eText, etc.
>
> I have to admit that I only looked at the examples for FOA, because
> the downloads are so huge, so I can't say what the Java looks like
> that makes it all happen; it can't be too small though. :) And the
> XML/XSL stuff just didn't do anything for me as far as being clear and
> understandable.
>
> I'd certainly like to hear opinions from others who have experience in
> this area, particularly with other languages, or know of other systems
> to compare against.
I am not an expert in these things, but I have woked (or maybe played?)
with some tools designed to those things. Nowadays most web site are
proposed into at least 2 formats, one of the ,ainstream browsers (PC based )
and those for PDA under WAP connection.
It's about 3 or even 4 years that there are tools like TOMCAT able to
generate different layout from a single XML document by applying different
XSL, XSLT or whatever can describe a layout or schema to represent the
contents. And using PDF is no more difficult with PHP.
which again can be used as a translator from XML. And Java is quite a
powerful language that can make it all at once (beside speed).
I really see anything revolutionary in that article, but for the fact that
they maybe have an optimized easy to use tool, which TOMCAT and JSP is not.
So the only thing I can see here important is that document content is
really what matter and XML can easily make you parse through it without
messing around with the layout and appareance. The sort of thing it was
though for.
Now all you need is a powerful XML parser and some other tool to make it
become the kind of document you want, HTML, DOC, PDF or even PNG. This can
be achieved in many many ways.
As I see Rebol somewhat powerful for parsing, I can't see any poweful tool
for it for real translation. So, IMHO, I won't really define it as a good
solution, nor it would be my choice if I ever had to do etherogeneous
document creation.
These are just my opinion. I am not an expert in this area nor in Rebol at
all. Maybe someone else has a better opinion on this subject.
M&F
