New
international standard adds native XML support to ECMAScript
Geneva, 20th July 2004:
The Ecma General Assembly has unanimously
approved ECMAScript for XML (E4X) as an international standard
(ECMA-357). E4X is a vendor-neutral set of programming language
extensions adding native XML support to ECMAScript (ECMA-262,
or ISO/IEC 16262), one of the most widely used programming
languages.
E4X provides a simple, familiar, XML programming
model that flattens the XML learning curve by leveraging
the existing skills and knowledge of one of the largest
developer communities worldwide. It reuses familiar programming
language concepts, operators and syntax for manipulating
XML data, meaning software developers can start creating,
navigating and manipulating XML with little to no additional
knowledge. E4X reduces code complexity, time to market and
revision cycles; decreases XML footprint requirements; and
enables looser coupling between code and external data.
The E4X standard was proposed in Ecma’s
programming languages Technical Committee (TC39) by a group
of companies led by BEA in June 2002. The ECMAScript Task
Group (TG1) of this committee immediately agreed and started
drafting the specification. Ecma members BEA, IBM, Microsoft,
Macromedia, Mozilla, Netscape/AOL and invited experts contributed
to the development of the specification.
The group has completed several independent
implementations to validate the specification and is already
working on the next version of E4X, which will include support
for the XML schema language and other type systems. BEA
has donated a complete E4X implementation to the Mozilla
open source project and expects it be available in August
2004 as Mozilla Rhino 1.6. Ecma International plans to include
the E4X feature set as an integral part of ECMAScript Edition
4.
“I'm proud of what we've accomplished”,
said John Schneider of AgileDelta, who led the development
of the standard representing BEA, “E4X brings the
power of simplicity back to XML. It's exciting to see leading
application server, browser and mobile device vendors pulling
together to make E4X available everywhere developers need
it.”
"E4X is amazingly intuitive and powerful",
said Adam Bosworth, Chief Architect and Senior Vice President
of Advanced Technologies at BEA, "It is a great improvement
over previous methods for dealing with XML and is an important
component for manipulating data in some of our products."
Jan van den Beld, Ecma International Secretary
General, commented, “All at Ecma are delighted with
this progress. If their constant enquiries are any indication,
ECMAScript users too are keen for the standard to evolve.
E4X will certainly be a jewel in future revisions of the
ECMAScript standard.”
Rod Smith, VP, Emerging Technologies -
Software Group, IBM commented "Our customers will benefit
from ECMAScript for XML. It provides a more intuitive approach
to incorporating XML into ECMAScript applications. This
powerful scripting technology will encourage new innovation
in dynamic HTML-based Internet applications."
"E4X brings even more power and functionality
to ECMAScript and shows the strength of open standards,"
said David Mendels, general manager, Macromedia. "We
leverage ECMAScript broadly throughout most of our products
and it serves as the foundation for ActionScript, the scripting
language for both Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Flex.
Continued refinement of this standard ensures our developers
are able to use a very familiar language for building rich
Internet applications."
“E4X brings simplicity, convenience,
and fun to XML processing, very much in keeping with the
spirit of ECMAScript's origins,” noted Brendan Eich
of Mozilla.org, creator of JavaScript, “I'm delighted
to see this expressive extension to the ECMAScript standard.
Both of Mozilla's JavaScript engines (Java and C versions)
will support E4X in the near future.”
About ECMAScript
The ECMAScript (ECMA-262 or ISO/IEC 16262)
Language Specification 3rd Edition, December 1999, is the
foundation for Web pages that do something more than displaying
text and images. As an indicator of its popularity, in June
2004, popular search engine Google found 21 million references
to “JavaScript”, 762 000 references to “JScript”
and 76 000 references to “ECMAScript”. This
represents nearly double the number of articles found in
February 2003.
The international standardization of the
language was originally driven by Ecma members Netscape
and Microsoft, whose browser- or server-specific implementations
include Netscape/AOL’s JavaScript and Microsoft’s
JScript, which offer supersets of this full-featured programming
language.
Ecma is in the process of harmonizing the
various diverging extensions of ECMAScript. Although the
recent closure of Netscape/AOL’s browser development
unit has delayed the scheduled publication of ECMA-262,
Edition 4 is now expected to be released in Q3 2005. This
will update the standard with respect to the language and
the various differing implementations.
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