RefleX and Active Tags were present at Balisage: The Markup Conference in August 2008 (Montréal, Canada).
The W3C XML Schema 1.1 is in a "last call working draft" status. One of the most significant change is perhaps the support of co-occurrence constraints that was missing in 1.0 and expected by the community. For the other missing stuffs -who knows what they are- we have to wait for W3C XML Schema 1.2 and so on. In this paper, we'll have a prospective approach: we examine some features that the author has already implemented as a demonstration, and imagine others that lead us to consider new usages of schema technologies.
For this purpose, we introduce an experimental but innovative schema technology : the Active Schema Language, or ASL. The strength of ASL comes from its runtime environment : the Active Tags engine that was presented last year at Extreme Markup Languages in Montreal. Active Tags can host several runnable tag libraries and a schema language like ASL is just another library like other tag libraries, but built on top of this framework that offers to ASL lots of valuable services.
RefleX and Active Tags were present at Extreme Markup Languages in August 2007 (Montréal, Canada). Abstract of the presentation :
Active Tags is a language-independent, general-purpose native XML programming system that provides a generic runtime container for multiple executable markup languages. Active Tags is not a markup language but a set of specifications that describe the system and its libraries (called "modules") and the catalog-like structure that holds it all together. Active Tags programs ("active sheets") are XPath-centric, like XSLT, and (also like XSLT) may contain both instructions and XML literals. Unlike XSLT, a single sheet may contain several instruction sets, each bound to a namespace, and the sheet may be procedural, declarative, or both. After explaining enough of the architecture to enable us all to follow the logic, the author illustrates active sheets that filter SAX streams using XPath patterns, utilize XML macro-tags, and browse non-XML data.
RefleX and Active Tags were present at <XML2006> in December 2006 (Boston, USA).
Less than 1 year after the first public release of the RefleX engine, Active Tags has been presented on a track dedicated to innovative and emergent XML technologies. Philippe Poulard will talk about Native XML Programming, showing that the Active Tags suite and its implementation, the RefleX engine, are efficient and reliable for integrating XML technologies to an original general-purpose system.
<XML2006> is one of the world-famous meetings on XML technologies that gathers the best XML gurus and experts. Don't miss <XML2006> !
RefleX 0.1 is now available for download.
This is the first public release announced of the famous Active Tags engine, that allow to make easily smart programs entirely in XML.
With Active Tags, you can dramatically decrease the number of lines to code. Each time you have to write 100 lines of code in your favorite language, consider that you can do the same with 10 lines of pure Active Tags : let the underlying engine work for you.
See also : the Active Tags specifications.