1060 NetKernel XML Technology Tour

A tour of the XML processing technologies

XRL

XML Resource Linker is a pull runtime for recursively generating and linking XML resources.

XRL uses a set of named links to recursively pull together the components of an XML resource. A named link has an internal URI reference and an optional external URI reference. The internal link is a URI reference to a resource which may be either static or dynamically generated. The optional external reference is used by the XRL mapper accessor to initiate an internal process - the ext/int link model enables the decoupling of the public REST interface from the internal address space.

A reference guide and a trailmap worked example of a web-site using XRL are provided

• XRL Reference
• XRL enabled Web-site

Demo

Here's is an example of a componentized page generated with xrl.

It is dynamically and recursively built from it's component parts - in this case the components are static but each could have been dynamically generated. Here is the outer template for this layout. The components are header, menu, body, column and footer.

The active URI which executed xrl to build the whole things is

the template is the starting point from which xrl recursively executes any xrl:include statements, the links document contains the named links which xrl uses to locate the internal resource to be recursively pulled into the content.

Look at the menu. It is actually two components, an outer menu (light blue) which uses an xrl:include to pull in the inner menu (dark blue)

XRL enables XHTML (or any other XML document) to be componentized. So for example we can restructure the whole layout just by modifying the outer most template.

The xrl runtime enables dynamic content to be built and allows every included component to receive user supplied queries, parameters, credentials, session etc. Each component can therefore be a full application in it's own right thus enabling a very powerful portal framework.