On Tuesday, Jul 15, 2003, at 15:40 America/Guayaquil, Tony Collen wrote:
More RTing:
Imagine having an XSL processor in the kernel:
You could "execute" .xsl files, bypassing having to run a processor manually.
prompt$ page2html.xsl < input.xml > output.html
Borrowing the pipeline concept from Cocoon:
prompt$ cat input.xml | page2foo.xsl | foo2bar.xsl | bar2html.xsl > output.html
One could even invent files which are actually transformation pipelines -- ones which you might not be able to directly edit (or maybe be able to edit a transformation in the middle):
prompt$ make-virtual-file-pipeline virtual.xml --generator=input.xml --tranformers=page2foo.xsl;foo2html.xsl --serialize=text/xml
Now you can just go
prompt$ cat virtual.xml
And get the output of the pipeline defined above, which you can then link to other pipelines, etc.
It's no wonder that this all fits in very well with what Cocoon does, since Cocoon is patterned after this concept. I'm sure if I stew on this concept enough I'll come up with more ideas and uses.
It might be a good mental exercise, but before you do, please remember that UNIX has no notion of structured pipelines as Cocoon does. That is, you will always need a serialization/parsing stage between different filters, which is instrinsically poor.
Also, consider that there is no type safety since all components are the same (unlike in cocoon where you can't have a transformer after a serializer).
So, keep in mind the differences.
-- Stefano.
