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Message-ID: <034201c35daa$614cc330$2ff1f682@har.mrc.ac.uk>
Reply-To: "Rob Oxspring" <roxspring@imapmail.org>
From: "Rob Oxspring" <roxspring@imapmail.org>
To: "Jakarta Commons Developers List" <commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
References: <245A7290F0E0D311BF6E009027E7908B0720474D@ATLANTA>
Subject: [CLI] XML -> CLI (was Re: Three month contribution to Commons?)
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 13:41:23 +0100
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There has been talk on a few occasions that there should be a way to get build a CLI interface from an XML definition but this is
the first time I've thought about it in any detail.  I'd always figured that the xml->cli transformation would take place at runtime
but the comment from Gary seems to suggest otherwise.  So what do people have in mind?

Is the xml2cli transformation people are thinking of a compile-time or runtime operation?

What sort of functionality should be produced by the transformation? - would the transformed code just present a CommandLine object
for the client code to query or would the code call specified methods on the client code?

Does anyone have an example of the sort of xml fragment they might expect to use?


I mainly just want to ponder briefly about what would be needed by the core API and see if my cli2 proposal will be able to cope.
(I'm aiming to have a new drop of my proposal ready sometime over the weekend so I'll let people play with the new ideas and pass
comment then).

Rob

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gary Gregory" <ggregory@seagullsw.com>
To: "'Jakarta Commons Developers List'" <commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org>; <epugh@upstate.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 7:26 PM
Subject: RE: Three month contribution to Commons?


> As you mentioned CLI, if you look at CLI messages yesterday or the day
> before on this list you'll see that there is a CLI 2.0 in the works but it
> seems that there are two main branches and approaches. I have not done work
> deep in CLI but I use it (version 1.0).
>
> Perhaps there is something there for you to do? Perhaps the two authors of
> CLI branches would like to comment or get help from you?
>
> From my end, one thing I would like a future CLI to be able to do is to
> define a CLI from an XML file such that CLI can generate Java code, Javadoc
> and HTML docs. But I'm just dreamin' here... ;-)
>
> Gary
>