Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1998

XML and Python Initiatives

XML

The following is a list of some initiatives for XML:

Channel Definition Format (CDF). An initiative by Microsoft and others to use XML as the basis for describing data for "Active Channels" in web browsers such as Internet Explorer 4.0.
Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML). An XML-based markup language from Allaire for server-side scripting of web applications.
Document Object Model (DOM). A W3C initiative to standardize the APIs for access to HTML and XML documents in a platform- and language-independent way.
Open Financial Exchange (OFE). An initiative by Microsoft, Intuit, and Checkfree to use XML to describe financial transactions.
Open Software Distribution (OSD). An initiative by Microsoft, Marimba, Installshield, and others for an XML-based software distribution mechanism over the Internet.
XML-Data. An initiative by Microsoft and others to use XML syntax to capture DTD information.
XSL. A standard for expressing how XML should be rendered. XSL provides greater formatting power than CSS/HTML, while being interoperable with both. XSL's expression language is, itself, XML combined with the use of ECMAScript for situations where a full-fledged programming language is required.

Python

Here are some initiatives for Python:

Grail. A World Wide Web browser written in Python by Guido van Rossum. Naturally, it supports the execution of Python as applets downloaded in HTML pages.
Python Image Library. Adds an image object to Python. Supports a variety of image file formats and processing options.
Bobo. A collection of software for building web applications with Python. The core of Bobo is an object-request broker (ORB) that converts HTTP requests into Python object requests.
Alice. A 3D graphics package that uses Python as its embedded scripting language.
kjParsing. A parser generator implemented in Python that generates Python code.
Python COM. A Python extension that makes Python interoperable with COM/ActiveX. It supports ActiveX scripting allowing Python to be used like Javascript both client side (Internet Explorer) and server side (IIS). It also allows Python to act as a Windows Scripting Host.

--S.M.