You then have two levels deep of macro preprocessing. Ouch.

I would imagine this sort of approach would be powerful if you are
cranking out Chinese menu type apps -- similar apps build of various
combinations of canned code, with a little customisation, e.g. retail
websites, databases of people, inventory systems.

I would imagine the problem would be in handling something new outside
the existing framework.  Either you have to add a wrinkle to the
engine to handle it, or have some escape hatch to add a customisation
that is not fragile (engine implementation dependent) and can be
understood without a deep knowledge of the engine implementation.

The irony is XML itself is so ruddy fluffy.  I'd think you would want
some terser syntax than that. It is sort of 3 steps forward and 1 step
back.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.