Hello Jess Users,
let me add a little to Ernest Friedman-Hill's and Mark Lilly's replies to
Todd Blanchard, even though Ernest's first sentence already has the point:
> Note that I didn't say Jess's rule language will be replaced by an XML
> version, but that Jess would interoperate with any such
> standard.
When there is an XML version of Jess you can interchange and integrate
information with other rule languages, with databases, as noted by Mark
Lilly, with XHTML documents, etc. Besides the XML parsers mentioned by
Mark and the translators mentioned by Ernest (we favor XSLT plus Cocoon),
you can also use XML editors, query languages, namespaces, metadata (RDF),
etc. from the growing toolbox. For example, the humanly readable form of
Jess rules and facts/records can be generated from their XML version via an
XSLT stylesheet translating to (X)HTML. I did this analogously for Relfun,
using the stylesheet at http://www.relfun.org/rfml/rfmlsp.xsl to generate
Relfun's normal Prolog-like syntax as (colored) HTML from its XML version
RFML (http://www.relfun.org/rfml/).
You should be able to upload Jess code on the Web in a (Java-generated) XML
version; at the other end people can reuse it in various transformed forms
and can also re(generate) it as humanly readable Jess code via stylesheets.
The entire strategy is given for the analogous case of functional-logic
languages in slides 4 & 5 of http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~boley/flmltalk.ps.
After having said this, let me add, just for completeness,
that the Prolog-like syntax
recordType(field1("Some Value"),field2("Other Value"))
and Jess's Lisp-like syntax
(recordType (field1 "Some Value")(field2 "Other Value"))
directly correspond to the XML version
<recordType>
<field1>Some Value</field1>
<field2>Other Value</field2>
</recordType>
which is somewhat shorter than Todd Blanchard's 'factness-enriched'
<fact>
<type>recordType</type>
<field1>Some Value</field1>
<field2>Other Value</field2>
</fact>
But some within the markup-language community would further shorten
<recordType>
<field1>Some Value</field1>
<field2>Other Value</field2>
</recordType>
to a version using the Lisp/Prolog-")"-like 'neutral' closing bracket
</>, as (re)introduced in XML-QL (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xml-ql/):
<recordType> <field1>Some Value</> <field2>Other Value</> </>
And, of course, modern XML-aware browsers will show you all these
markups graphically, as bookmark-like collapsible trees, abstracting
from all the syntactic sugar (salt?) of Prolog, Lisp, and XML(-QL):
recordType
|
|
|----------field1......Some Value
|
|
|----------field2......Other Value
Altogether, XML markup is not that special, but spreads on the Web.
Best, Harold
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