Building Dynamic Applications With Mozilla, REX and XQuery.
http://2006.xmlconference.org/programme/presentations/9.html

Desré, Fabrice
XML 2006
2006

Abstract:

The Mozilla platform offers a rich support of XML techniques, from low level ones (XPath, RDF, DOM, e4x) to rendering dialects like XHTML, SVG, XUL and XForms, thus making this platform a natural choice for the XML inclined. It is becoming a platform of choice when developing rich connected applications. When building dynamic applications, the developer is often facing a common set of programming patterns : gathering data from various remote and local sources, storing data with an optional transformation phase, and updating parts of the GUI to reflect the modifications in the data store. With today's ubiquitous use of XML as a data exchange syntax, a major part of these tasks can be achieved with XML based solutions. In this article we will present an XML centric solution that aims at minimizing the impedance mismatch between different data models that plagues classical architectures involving for instance XML/object/relationnal translation. It combines some of Mozilla's existing capabilities with REX (Remote Events for XML) and a native XML database with XQuery support. REX provides means to update the XUL based GUI and the database, while the XML database is used as a versatile storage engine.