Here are the thoughts from a humble programmer's perspective about XEN:
- XML should not be included in the language, for XML is a format an it is irrelevant. The concept should prevail over the format.
- The inclusion of the "attribute" keyword is crucial to convert XML/Other messages to objects in one shot without losing data. This will enable us to work with real objects not with useless trees. The impedance mismatch XML-to-Object will be reduced to zero.
- If XML will continue to be used as a standard format, IT WILL HAVE TO HAVE ARRAYS/TUPLES/COLLECTIONS. Or the impedance mismatch Objects-to-XML will remain high.
- The definition of schemas as part of the language is one big step in the right direction. But be careful with meaningless symbols like * ? &, it is better to use descriptive metadata like [choice: optional | required, min:1 max:10].
- I applaude the use of oQuery and oPath as part of the language, xQuery and xPath were just a bad nightmare same as Xsd schemas.
- Finally we understood that productivity and angle brackets don't go along, I hope the XAML team can get some ideas out of this.
- My only wish would be to include a Serializer from/to Source (besides xml and binary) that will allow us to share schemas and messages in their natural state, as human readable strings.
You can not imagine the gigantic advance that these new features will bring to the world of computing, you just can't.
Kudos to the insatiable researchers who work out of the spotlight to make this happen, for the sake of progress .