Comment #69 on issue 235 by [email protected]: Support the Javascript E4X extension
http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=235
I know I chimed in fairly early on this... to me, the biggest use with be with node in order to interact with existing web services, and wsdl based systems that use XML at the core. I think this is vital functionality in this space. Yes, the DOM and SAX based parsers can be used within the browser space, however E4X is almost always faster than SAX, and the DOM parser doesn't work for web workers (iirc).
On a side note, I've written a fair amount of Flex code, as well as worked with .Net ... Currently VB.Net supports XML literals with a very E4X-like syntax for interacting with XElement objects (blind xml nodes). I've been using this as a basis for communication in a client-server project with Flex and the interaction is very natural. JSON would have been my preferred/lighter path of data exchange, but XML with E4X was actually much easier to work with on both ends with less resistance at both ends. I would love to see this level of integration into the browser proper, if Chrome supported this, I fervently feel that IE and Opera would fall into line with the rest, as I feel some very useful service front-ends could be developed with heavy browser-side logic, with backend xml data services (that already exist).
Again, my biggest use case would still be with node in interacting with backend or foreign services. I do think it would be very useful for plugins in Chrome in the near future, and for browser based applications in the longer term. The heavy investment in XML based web services aren't going anywhere for several decades, especially given the investment in the government space (Lots of J2EE/Java based WSDL XML web services out there), and only growing in business organizations. Interacting with these systems organically would be unbelievably useful.
As much as I like V8, I've been considering the use of SpiderNode over NodeJS for this one reason alone. I also use Synchronet, which uses an XML enabled SpiderMonkey engine that has been very useful with E4X.
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