RE: Web apps on the AS/400

[Pete Hall <pbhall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:01 03/21/2001, Brad Stone wrote:
>I was with you up until the "self-describing" part.
>
>Sure, to humans it is, but those tags don't mean squat to a computer without
>a parser and someone telling it what to do with the data.

But the parser is already built and available for free. AlphaWorks has one 
for AS/400, and Microsoft has one for WinTel. They both fully support the 
document object model. There are also 3rd party DOM implementations (Saxon, 
Xalan, xt) for other platforms as well as Wintel. You can run XPath 
queries, which are only a little more complicated than SQL and use XSLT for 
formatting with the MS implementation. I don't know about AlphaWorks. 
There's really a great deal of power in the DOM, and it doesn't take a 
whole lot of work to use it once you get past the initial learning curve. 
Other 3rd party vendor products are iXSLT from Infoteria, 4XSLT from 
FourThought, EZ/X from Activated Intelligence, Stylus from Excelan. I don't 
know anything about them other than that they exist. I used the DOM 
yesterday in a program that's not doing anything (else) with XML to 
manipulate an array of structures, precisely because it's so easy to use.


Pete Hall
pbhall@execpc.com
http://www.execpc.com/~pbhall/

+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---