Comments on: Program Generators with XML and Java

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:17:44 +0000

The ideal reader for this book would know Java, but would know nothing about program generators (or compilers) and nothing about XML. They’d want to take things slowly, and wouldn’t mind if they didn’t get very far. In return, they’d get a surprisingly long introduction to “domain analysis”, a decent medium-length introduction to XML and XSL, a quick look at using the Java DOM parser for XML, and some examples.

I was disappointed with the lack of discussion of program generator basics, most fundamentally when to write a program generator versus when to write an interpreter, a parametric program, or as is more typically required, some mix of these approaches. And what about wizards, the most transparent modern incarnation of program generators? And how does this all interact with frequency of program generation and version control? There was no discussion of programming language basics like semantic versus syntactic well-formedness and error reporting, which have their peculiarities in XML and Java.

A primary concern with the whole XML (not to mention Java) enterprise is scalability. There was no discussion of writing efficient program generators; SAX is only mentioned in passing! Even more surprisingly, there is no discussion of generating efficient code, the latter being a primary motivator for many program generation efforts.

Despite the daunting number of pages, this book can be read in one sitting due to the huge font and wide margins.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:24:40 +0000

This book is definitely interesting in understanding how code generation works and how to utilize some of the newer technologies like XML and XSL to generate software. I am very impressed with some of the new, advanced code generators like CodeCharge, which utilize XML and XSL but do not give us insight to the internals of how it works. While those tools prove that XML and XSL are great for generatng code, this book explains how it is done.
Rating: 4 / 5

By: J. Ungerleider

J. Ungerleider — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:23:23 +0000

I can only assume that Mr. Cleaveland was attempting to woo the legions of Web site developers into writing program generators (PG) with this book. The book centers around a pointless example of how to generate pop-up web pages which call each other when their respective buttons are pressed.
Out of the 13 chapters, 3 are worth mentioning. Chapters 4, 6, and 7 deal with what to consider when writing a PG and how to make it flexible and Mr. Cleveland does bring some worthwhile points to the table. Throughout the other chapters, trivial code snippets are given of how to write the code (in Java, DOM, and XSLT) to generate the pages, however, because the examples are so simplistic any one who knows these languages would know how to write them anyway.
In the future, I would strongly recommend the following:
1. Give examples that people will actually want to use
2. Give examples that highlight your points
3. Get rid of chapters 2 and 3 (domain analysis), they are useless.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:14:52 +0000

After getting this book, I find out that it is really a new area for me, as a Java programmer. Actually, this book clearly illustrates what is a program generator and how we should “generate” such a tool using Java and XML. I appreciate the author’s excellent experience and work.
Rating: 4 / 5

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:24:38 +0000

While the book has interesting ideas, it ignores useful results of the domain-specific language community. More important, it preaches to use XML as a domain-specific language, which is in my opinion a disastrous idea.

Terence Parr (jGuru.com) provides an excellent argument why this is the case in his article “Answers to the question ‘When shouldn’t you use XML?’”, August 2001, IBM developerWorks : XML zone : XML zone articles:

“XML is a poor human interface: Humans have an innate ability to apply structure to a stream of characters (sentences), therefore,
adding markup symbols can only make it harder for us to read and more laborious to type. The problem is that most
programmers have very little experience designing and parsing computer languages. Rather than spending the time to design
and parse a human-friendly language, programmers are using the fastest path to providing a specification language and
implementation: “Oh, use XML. Done.” And that’s OK, but I want programmers to recognize that they are providing an inferior
interface when they take that easy route.”

Besides, the book is poorly typeset. It appears that the font was increased until the book had more than 400 pages. I have never seen a bigger font in a computing book! I don’t know why Prentice Hall endangers their good reputation with such a poorly typeset publication. Better try to borrow the book first before potentially wasting your money.
Rating: 2 / 5