From: Henrik Martensson <henrik.martensson@...>
Date: 2006-02-24T07:59:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Creating Ruby Classes from XSD?

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 18:32, Logan Capaldo wrote:
<snip>
> Ok, I'm going to be honest and say first I've never had occasion to  
> use this tool. But I'm wondering what exactly is the point? Ruby's  
> syntax is much less verbose than XML.
> Why would you want to type  this:
<snipped a W3C Schema>
> When you can do one of these:
<snipped Ruby class definitions
> 
> I may have mangled some of the XSD, I'm admitedly not familiar with  
> it, but generating classes froma  schema seems rife with problems
> 

The basic idea is that if you have a schema specification, you can
generate classes for whatever language you want, and the applications
that use them will all understand the same data formats.

Unfortunately, the idea is flawed. You are quite right. There isn't much
of a point. Building classes directly from a data format specification
makes the application using the classes tightly coupled to the data
format.

In most cases it is better to work with a generic XML parsing API,
wether it is REXML, DOM, SAX, or something else. It makes it a lot
easier to write robust applications.

I have worked with SGML/XML for a long time. I like XML, but not for
everything. One of the things that attracted me to Ruby is that it has
to a large part escaped the "XML for everything" craze that permeats
Java, and to some extent .NET. 


/Henrik

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