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Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 15:52:39 -0500
Subject: Re: [RT] The perfect repository might be just under your eyes
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From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefano@apache.org>
To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
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On Tuesday, Jul 15, 2003, at 15:40 America/Guayaquil, Tony Collen wrote:

> More RTing:
>
> Imagine having an XSL processor in the kernel:
>
> You could "execute" .xsl files, bypassing having to run a processor 
> manually.
>
> prompt$ page2html.xsl < input.xml > output.html
>
> Borrowing the pipeline concept from Cocoon:
>
> prompt$ cat input.xml | page2foo.xsl | foo2bar.xsl | bar2html.xsl > 
> output.html
>
> One could even invent files which are actually transformation 
> pipelines -- ones which you might not be able to directly edit (or 
> maybe be able to edit a transformation in the middle):
>
> prompt$ make-virtual-file-pipeline virtual.xml --generator=input.xml 
> --tranformers=page2foo.xsl;foo2html.xsl --serialize=text/xml
>
> Now you can just go
>
> prompt$ cat virtual.xml
>
> And get the output of the pipeline defined above, which you can then 
> link to other pipelines, etc.
>
> It's no wonder that this all fits in very well with what Cocoon does, 
> since Cocoon is patterned after this concept.  I'm sure if I stew on 
> this concept enough I'll come up with more ideas and uses.

It might be a good mental exercise, but before you do, please remember 
that UNIX has no notion of structured pipelines as Cocoon does. That 
is, you will always need a serialization/parsing stage between 
different filters, which is instrinsically poor.

Also, consider that there is no type safety since all components are 
the same (unlike in cocoon where you can't have a transformer after a 
serializer).

So, keep in mind the differences.

--
Stefano.