Re: [wsbpel] Issue - 11 Your opinion requested

[Danny van der Rijn <dannyv@tibco.com>]

From: "Ron Ten-Hove" <Ronald.Ten-Hove@Sun.COM>
>
>     Neither solution will be very good at complex transformations; the
> term painful comes to mind. (I suggest that for such transformations we
> should use existing solutions like XSLT, and keep in mind emerging ones,
> like XQuery.)

neither proposal was meant to do the things that XSLT can do.  i fully
support the issue to add XSLT support to BPEL.  however, there is, IMO, a
great need for something to provide small, local manipulations to XML trees.
something along the lines of the <assign> activity, but not quite so
crippled.  XSLT is too heavyweight to use for a simple append operation, for
instance.

>
>      Finally, both solutions embrace a decidely imperative approach to
> defining the tree structure of a result, when the <assign> activity
> itself can contain the tree structure desired in a declarative fashion
> that is far easier to create and read. Something along the lines of
>
>     <node from=...>          <!-- root node -->
>        <node from=.../>      <!-- 1st child of root node -->
>        <node from=...>       <!-- 2nd child of root node; or
>                                   following sibling to 1st child -->
>           <attr from=.../>   <!-- attribute for 2nd child -->
>        </node>
>     </node>
>

again, this would be fine for *constructing* data, but for simple
modifications, it would be too heavyweight.  it may also require a lot of
knowledge of what the data looks like, which might not be desirable.