Xaware.org looks prett slick. I’m in a session with one of the xaware guys going through the process of using xaware.
OK – we had a long intro, but are finally seeing some screenshots, which look useful. Xaware will bring value to scenarios with many complex XML documents. The fewer or less complex your XML files are, the less useful Xaware will be (from the presenter).
I’m not 100% sure why this is necessarily more useful than accessing data directly via XML in Groovy, for example (println results.users.user.name.first for example). Certainly having a graphic tool to manage the mappings would be useful, but I’m not sure this is a requirement. Well, nothing is a requirement, I guess. I think 3-4 years ago I’d have jumped all over this, but I’m not sure it’s targetted at me now. However, I’m not working on projects with numerous disparate XML data sources. If I was, perhaps I might see more use.
I wonder if this is 2 way? Can I publish data to a java data source (exposed via xaware) that would WRITE or MODIFY XML for me? Don’t know yet.
The demo has been interesting, but the session as a whole didn’t quite match up to the session name = “taming your messy mashups”. I was expecting more code, not a tool. It’s not bad, but not what I was expecting. Watching a visual mapping between COBOL file data and XML structure was interesting.
Still, xaware.org might be a tool you’d be interested in using for XML mapping and reading.
Thanks for taking the time to go to the presentation. I just wanted to answer your question about exposing a java data source through XAware that would write or modify xml. That is absolutely possible, you can write to a JMS destination, file, relational database, or call another webservice, or post to an http destination. It really is very flexible for both accessing your data and shredding your data to go to just about anywhere you want it to go to. There is also an xml mapping bizcomponent for modifying the xml, you can also call an XSLT, and it is easy to call multiple data sources to enhance your xml before going to somewhere else. BizDocuments and BizComponents are the xml meta-data representing the services you would create. Oh yeah, don’t forget we have a java bizcomponent that you can use to call a java class of your choosing and it can be chained with all of your other bizcomponents. I hope this helps, feel free to stop by our community if you have more questions and we will do our best to answer them.
-Tim Ferguson, xaware.org
Michael,
Thanks for attending the session and for this post. To answer your question, “I wonder if this is 2 way? Can I publish data to a java data source (exposed via xaware) that would WRITE or MODIFY XML for me?” Yes, XAware is fully bidirectional, allowing you to construct XML composite views of data data sources which allow you to write and update as well as read data through services. The downloads and some great tutorials are at XAware.org Thanks again.
Bill Miller, XAware.org