On 12 Jul 2005, at 06:05, Michael Champion wrote:

> Sure, jAXB has their mapping, other Java vendors have their mapping,
> Indigo has their mapping ... getting them to interop is the problem
> AFAIK.I don't know how much of this is everyone wanting to standardize
> on what they do, and  and how much of it is real conceptual
> differences between the platforms.  There are a lot of smart people
> working on this and I don't get a sense that the problems are just NIH
> / "can't we all just get along  by doing it MY way".  Premature
> standardization got us into this mess, so I think that there is a lot
> of skepticism that ad hoc standardization will get us out.


The Chairs' report, published last night, attempts to summarise the
discussion at the workshop around this very topic, see 'Profiles':

http://www.w3.org/2005/06/21-schema-workshop/chairs-report.html

I personally think standardisation of 'object mapping', even within
a set of today's best of breed technologies such as Java/C#/Python is
a little dangerous given XML is about exchanging documents, or at least
interoperating with those who want to work with XML directly. What
goes on behind the XML curtain is very much a per-implementation 
concern.

Having said that, I believe there is real value in knowing which aspects
of schema are most likely to give 'a good user experience' when using
today's data binding tools.  I tried to explain in BT's experience 
report
how such an 'implicit profile' already exists - in particular what 
works well
with .NET code generation - that's who most people seem to test against.
Unfortunately it's left as an exercise to each publisher to ascertain
what actually works well through a process of trial and error.

I've also heard many people asking how to express common data structures
such  as collections, arrays, indexed tables, etc to 'round-trip' to and
from XML on the same platform or so they /might/ surface in similar 
form in
another programming model. I think that's a related, though subtlety 
different
requirement to a 'profile' in that it is much more wide-ranging than 
'objects'
and is currently being discussed as a possible topic of a WSDL WG note.

--
http://blog.whatfettle.com