Core Development Concepts

The design for XML-Echo was based upon several concepts


Published August 19, 2005

The design team behind XML-Echo was initially motivated by several key concepts.

• Much of information processing can be viewed or expressed as transformations of data. Programs are filters that, given an input, produce an output.
• Sophisticated, powerful information processing systems can be built by composing smaller, special purpose transformation filters in processing chains. This is known as the pipes and filters model.
• A simple, common data format (XML) capable of representing a wide range of rich, complex data structures is ideal to send through the pipes between the filters.
• XSLT is ideal for defining many, but not all transformation filters.
• A language is necessary to compose filters into processing chains.
• By making that language representable ina common data format (XML), processing chains can be used to dynamically construct new processing chains, therebygainingadditional expressive power, while keeping the number of commands in the language small.
• By connecting the filters with parse event streams, performance is enhanced,without information loss.
• An execution environment for the processing chains is required to provide services such as authorization, connectivity, and collection management.