XOo°F components

The XOo°F framework consists of the following components:

  • XMLStruct: an XML Schema for data structures.

  • XMLClass: an XML Schema for application server specification. It relies on XMLStruct, is message-oriented and technology-independent.

  • XMLDispatcher: a manner to implement a stateless application server. Code is generated from the application server specification.

Relation to standards and industry platforms

While the XOo°F specification formats can be considered proprietary, its strength comes out of the fact that it is also technology agnostic. For instance, it is very difficult to communicate between Java and Microsoft environment; by having platform-neutral specifications written with XOo°F it is very easy to build bridges between such different worlds.

Making it easy to write adapters between platforms and technologies, XOo°F can be seen as a way to future-proof applications.

Indeed such adapters have been built for various platforms programming languages and protocols:

  • HTTP-DCOM adapter enabling, communication between a Microsoft COM+ based server and any platform capable of doing HTTP and XML;

  • HTTP-Java adapter, enabling communication between Java servers and any platform capable of doing HTTP and XML;

  • TIBCO/Rendezvous-DCOM adapter, enabling communication to a COM+ server over the Rendezvous protocol;

  • SOAP/WSDL adapter, enabling the invokation of XOo°F servers using SOAP client toolkits;

  • ...

The following table illustrates the correspondancy between various technologies:

Services specification

Messages specification

Communication format

XOo°F

class and interface dtds

struct dtd

XMLDispatcher

Web Services

WSDL

W3C XML Schemas

SOAP

CORBA

IDL interfaces

IDL method parameters

IIOP

Microsoft DCOM

MIDL interfaces

MIDL method parameters

Microsoft extensions to DCE RPC

Java RMI

Java interfaces

Java method parameters

Java serialization format