Xerox will announce today the availability of an experimental
programming language intended to make it easy to transform
documents and data between specific formats, enabling documents to
be read regardless of what application or device is used.
The Circus-DTE (Data Transformation Environment) programming
language, which has been posted on
www.alphaAve.com, is
available for testing. Circus-DTE has been on the site since
November and has had 5,000 downloads, but the company has just
received clearance to publicly detail the language, a Xerox
representative said.
The language is a research project developed at the Xerox Research
Centre of Europe, in Grenoble.
Circus-DTE is intended for environments in which document portals
abound and documents and data must move on the Web or in business
processes, according to Xerox. The language is intended to provide
a middle ground between a general-purpose, low-level language that
needed lengthy development of complex algorithms and a high-level,
but inflexible, approach.
"Circus DTE is a programming language intended to address the
problems inherent in document transformation," said Bob Campbell,
manager of the alphaAve.com Web site. Developers would write an
application specific to their environment, depending on what types
of data they need to transform into what type of output, he
added.
Xerox said the language is suited to data processing or the
transformation of structured documents, and it validates results
produced so that input into another application will function
properly. Circus-DTE translates the document so it can be viewed
from a PDA, mobile phone, or laptop with a multitude of
applications.
The company believed Circus-DTE could be especially useful when
there are multiple document transformations, such as document
content processing, Internet publishing, publishing on handheld
devices, and database-to-XML conversions.
Processing a customer order, for example, requires a series of
transformations, including inputting data into applications that
check inventory and availability, preparing shipping documentation,
generating an invoice, processing payments, and maybe publishing to
a Web site for customer tracking, Xerox said.
Circus-DTE is available for free 90-day trials, after which users
can contact Xerox to discuss licensing opportunities or suggest
enhancements to the language. There may not be a charge for using
it after 90 days, depending on use.
"In many ways, we're searching for direction on how we can use
this," Campbell said.
The alphaAve.com Web site is jointly managed by Xerox and the
Rochester Institute of Technology for programmers and developers
who want to try out software from commercial and academic research
centers.
Among other technologies available on alphaAve.com are Automatic
Image Enhancement, which is a tool to boost visual quality of
images, and STITCH-CLF, a middleware tool for harnessing
heterogeneous and distributed resources such as databases,
services, legacy systems, printers and PDAs.