[2440] in java-interest
The MetaMedia Project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael D. McCool)
Mon Oct 2 20:52:10 1995
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 95 17:35:51 -0400
From: "Michael D. McCool" <mmccool@cgl.uwaterloo.ca>
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
I've been lurking on the mailing lists for a while, and thought I should let
people know that we've begun a project at the University of Waterloo to
create a "MetaClient" that can understand arbitrary SGML documents. Basically,
the idea is to provide the structure of a document class in a DTD, then
provide the semantics of all elements of that document type with a collection
of Java objects that share a standard interface. A grammar-driven frontend
would allow the interpretation of ARBITRARY languages as well as arbitrary
SGML markup. The only "standards" involved would be a fairly unrestrictive
interface used by objects defining the semantics of each element of a DTD,
and SGML and Java themselves.
Bottom line: I don't think Java should be used to distribute "applications",
it should be used to distribute the semantics of the *languages* used to
describe the content. Applets are handy if you WANT monolithic content;
but...
Our prototype, which we hope to release in late November, will be a
"mega-applet" which should run inside the Beta version of the applet
interface. Basically, it would use HotJava to bootstrap itself.
Depending on how flexible the applet interface proves to be, and how
efficient this approach is, this may or may not be our final
implementation approach.
I don't think this is a totally unique idea, and if anyone else is working
on a similar idea I think we should hook up. We fully intend to make the
result of our work available at the source code level, in the absence of
other external constraints. We're also going to be using the system
(hopefully) to support a distributed learning environment at the University
of Waterloo.
The URL http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~mmccool/Meta/index.html provides some
links to documents on the project. Oh yeah, the index page contains a "logo"
applet with the beta api.
Michael McCool.
PS Leo Chan, who posted earlier about 3D APIs, is also working on this project.
In theory, the system we are proposing should make implementation of VRML,
or any other 3D markup language, "trivial" if an appropriate 3D graphics
backend is available in the client.
--
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~mmccool/ mailto:mmccool@cgl.uwaterloo.ca
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