Is XML suitable for web application GUIs?

Yes. Is it a silver bullet? No.

"Thomas Eyde" <thomas.eyde@online.no> wrote:
>Is XML suitable for web application GUIs?
>
>All examples I have browsed, seem to address how to transform document XML
>to HTML. I have yet to find similar examples addressing dynamic GUIs.
>
>Documents are static, the screens in a web application are not.
>
>I have no problem transforming XML to HTML, but for my application the XSLT
>documents becomes very complex and contains a lot of XSLT logic.
>
>It seems to me that the gain is gone. The GUI is separated from its data,
>but at the cost of even more complex GUI programing code. I feel the
>maintenance cost going up.
>
>/Thomas
>
>

Not offhand. You probably want to look at SOAP examples. I basically created
my own "SOAP" since I needed Java to work with VB and they seemed to be doing
their own thing at the time SOAP-wise (and maybe still are). Most all other
examples do as you decribe. They might show how to TX and RX xml over HTTP,
but the majority of time is spent on XSL/XML.

Mark

"Thomas Eyde" <thomas.eyde@online.no> wrote:
>Do you have any references to design patterns, best practices or similar..?
>
>/Thomas
>
>"MarkN" <mnuttall@nospam.com> wrote in message
>news:3be68a45@147.208.176.211...
>>
>> Yes. Is it a silver bullet? No.
>
>
>

You could try using a 3rd party product that has tackled these problems already.
The one I have seen is called Altio, although there must be others. It uses
XML to define a UI, and has an applet to dynamically display it. In this
respect it is like a 4GL or something. There is a visual, drag and drop design
tool that also runs through the browser, and it is a matter of days to produce
a UI that looks better than anything DHTML & style sheets can do.

It uses XML for data too, and can connect to any SQL data source (using JDBC),
web services, soap, url etc. The UI has features like mini windows, drag
and drop, live updates, traffic lighting in lists, fired by live updates
streamed from their servlet engine. All the normal features you might expect
from a non web application. It has graphs that update dynamically too.

From what I have seen of it, if is an amazing way to a quick internet/intranet
application.

"seth" <sberger@estco.net> wrote:
>
>We've been in the midst of a large scale XML, ASP, Web Application. We are
>using extensive XML and ASP. Along with loads of DHTML, and CSJS.
>
>As the development has progressed, we've found XML /XSL incredible for some
>things, horrible for others. In general, XML and XSL require more code to
>get to work together. However sometimes that pays off, if you will be making
>lots of changes. It also depends how you typically structure your code.
If
>you tend to make all your programs with configuration files, then XML/XSL
>may not be far off. If you hard code a lot of things, than jumping to XML
>and XSL might be a little more painful.
>
>Another issue, is how much of the code you can port to other projects. Using
>the XML / XSL allows us to reuse signifcant code snippets, and build really
>powerful libraries of code.
>
>In short, since we are still in the 1st generation XML applications, we
are
>learning some lessons. There really are no hard rules that we've come up
>with. The important thing though, is not to get XML happy and try to do
things
>that its not meant for.
>
>Seth