hi,

People that are intersting in native XML programming can download the
RefleX engine freely here :
http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr
RefleX is available under the french license CeCILL, which is almost the
same as the well-known GNU GPL.

RefleX is a Java tool that allows people that have no particular
knowledge of Java to write smart programs entirely in XML ; however, the
most brave fellows could also design their own tags and plug them to the
engine ! Have a look at the "How-To" section to achieve this.

The concepts of native XML programming used in RefleX have been designed
separately, so that other implementations on other platforms/languages
can be considered.

Why programming in XML ?

At INRIA, we have experienced RefleX on a *real* operational project,
and it appears that :
-the code is very easy to produce
-the amount of code produced is very tiny
Despite the intrinsic verbosity of XML, the expressiveness of XPath
(which is used intensively in Active Tags) and the ability to declare
complex processes exposed as simple tags makes Active Tags programs very
efficient.

Active Tags has been designed like a programming language : it offers
several libraries (called modules) for different purpose : system
interactions, I/O, SQL, Web, etc and allow users to define simply their
own libraries, but Active Tags differs from other programming languages
in many ways... read more on the Active Tags website or on the RefleX
web site !

http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr
http://disc.inria.fr/perso/philippe.poulard/xml/active-tags/

You'll find on the RefleX web site some tutorials that are showing the
traditional "hello world" example, how to publish an entire XML
repository to HTML, how to map SQL to XML, how to design an MVC
architecture, and how to play with datatypes and PSVI ; most of them are
available in batch mode as well as in a Web application ready to run.

Don't say anymore that Santa Claus doesn't exists !

Enjoy !

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