TreeBind seems to be getting more visible :
- My submission for XTech 2006 has been accepted.
- Ron Bourret has added TreeBind in his XML Data Binding Resources.
- Oleg Parashchenko has sent me a couple of references about his own Scheme based proposal to deal with hierarchical structures : « Reusing XML Processing Code in non-XML Application » and « XML View on Hierarchical Data Using SXML and Scheme« . He has also been kind enough to include TreeBind in his bibliography.
- David Webber has asked if I though TreeBind could be plugged into jCAM.
Last week I have attended several SD West sessions that gave me interesting ideas for TreeBind:
- Under the rather misleading title « Enterprise Java for Elvis« , Cay Horstmann has presented some good stuff coming with EJB 3.0. I have been impressed by the POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) can now be used and that most of the persistence configuration can be done through Java annotations. That’s something we could useful within TreeBind: annotations are available through reflexion and could be use to convey serialization information such as the relative order of sub-elements and whether a property should be written as element or attribute.
- Allen Holub has given his very enlightening presentation: « Everything You Know is Wrong: Extends and Get/Set Methods are Evil » during which he explains why classes should expose behaviors rather than properties. When you think about it, that seems obvious enough but that still helps when someone such as Allen Holub explains it! The exceptions are for serialization and deserialization where classes need to expose their internals (Allen Holub says that the languages should take care of that but that’s not yet the case with Java). Even in that case, he favours specific « importer » and « exporter » classes over the getters and setters and that’s an option that could be used by TreeBind too (the current version relies on getters and setters).
- Rick Wayne had proposed « Railin’ on AJAX » and I was looking forward seeing what was behind the Ruby on Rails buzz. How’s that related to TreeBind? One of the lessons learned from Ruby on Rails is this « DRY » (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle and the way Rails generates the classes from the database. That would be easy enough for TreeBind to generate the Java classes corresponding to a XML document. This could be done by TreeBind itself, through a TreeBind Sink which would write Java source files. Annotations could be added to the document to describe cardinalities and datatypes and the XML document would be used as schemas are used by SAX-B. Using XML instances as schemas? Doesn’t that ring a bell? That’s exactly what Examplotron is about!
What’s the common thread between all that?
The initial motivation is still there: to make binding as transparent and lightweight as possible and Java as agile as it can be!