Imagine writing an office system today, with no legacy
to hold you back. You might build anXML processorwhich can handle
"unstructured" documents (which have lots of structure as long as
you can recognise it) as XML documents and translate other
structured formats (particularly SQL) into XML for processing. The
equivalent ofMicrosoft Officewould just fall out
on the way, but you would have a lot more than Office,
writesDavid
Norfolk, senior analyst, development,
atBloor Research.
This is more-or-less what
JustSystems is offering with xfy Technology, a fundamentally
disruptive technology being promoted as "the world's first
XML-based information delivery framework". That claim is open to
argument - Software AG (for example) has something called Tamino
that could take the same description - but it is probably true on
the desktop (despite Microsoft's new-found enthusiasm for XML, the
OpenXML vs Opendoc disputes suggest that Microsoft might not use
XML quite as others do).
JustSystems itself has a respectable provenance, as it claims to
be the largest supplier of desktop technology in Japan (it has a
suite of Office products), was founded in 1979 and is only now
leaving Japan with its xfy product. Interestingly, it acquired
XMetaL, an XML-based authoring and content collaboration tool, in
2006.
Xfy is a data processor not a word processor and can create all
sorts of standards-based documentation. It could be described as an
XML browser, rather than a web browser. It deals with XML from
scratch and makes use of XML Schema, Extensible Stylesheet Language
Transformations (XSLT) and the extensibility of XML. Ben Walshaw,
head of technical services for Emea at JustSystems Europe, says,
regarding xfy, that he is fully aware of the semantics issues with
XML (XML has no semantics its tags have no "meaning", but we assume
meanings when we recognise a tag name), which bodes well for the
resilience of xfy-based systems. The semantics issue is important
because making assumptions about the meanings of tags can be
misleading when you base decisions on them (and such assumptions
break down completely when, for example, an English-speaker meets
XML written in Korean). The semantics issue is partly addressed by
using domain experts to do the tagging (in a medical document, for
example, is "black" a name, a colour, a symptom, an emotional
metaphor or a colour-coding?) but tagging then becomes a data
analysis exercise, with similar political issues and value-add, and
it needs a metadata repository to hold the semantic
associations.
Xfy is an integrating technology that can present technologies
with very different
"Look and
Feel" in a single
rch internet application (RIA) style of interface. To cope with
non-internet data sources, it needs to support RIA outside of the
browser, which has the useful advantage that disconnected use is
supported easily (the last information found is cached and
collisions resolved on reconnection). Disconnected use is a bit of
an issue with existing RIA applications - such as Silverlight and
Flex - but this will probably be addressed, eventually.
Disconnected use brings the problem of several people updating
the same information independently and xfy's collision resolution
does not seem to be particularly sophisticated for now. However,
full versioning/configuration management is supported (nothing is
ever overwritten, according to Walshaw, just marked obsolete) so
any issues should be resolvable. Strong audit trails are
supported.
Xfy competes with Silverlight and Flex, but it is just about
XML, not code - it is "just" an RIA-style framework for
near-real-time applications. It is most effective in (but not
limited to) Java environment, as xfy has a Java-based client that
can combine/unify/normalise and visualise information from multiple
sources on the client side without the need for server-based
scripting. Debuggers are available but everything is built from
reusable XML components, so xfy users should not get into deep,
complicated programming-style logic.
JustSystems' own internal vision seems to be that "the document
is the application". It is reminiscent of IBM's old OS/2 Opendoc
vision, although it also seems to be part of the W3C Document
Object Model (DOM) vision. Jake Sorofman, vice-president of
marketing and business development for North America at
JustSystems, says that "JustSystems has the potential to disrupt
the document publishing and the application development space. With
xfy, the lines blur between these categories. Many processes
require the persistence and context of a document and the dynamism
and interactivity of a business application. They require
structured data to come together with unstructured content - not
only on the glass, but as part of a unified document. For many
document-centric processes, the document becomes the new
application context. We are no longer making a trade off between
the live data and interactivity of a business application and the
persistence and context of a document".
To summarise, xfy is a new approach to building RIA, which
produces composite documents based on standard XML and integration
via XSLT. It is a framework for
enterprise mashups with role-based visualisation and
translation - which "enables" the addition of semantics (meaning)
to data (its roadmap seems to support semantic web in the future)
and manages complexity. It features fast deployment, and there is
no expensive XML parsing before data can be used. It is centralised
and server-based.