W3C Finalizes XML Workflow Spec

Posted 05/12/2010 at 5:04am | by Paul Lilly

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The World Wide Consortium (W3C) Tuesday announced a new tool for managing XML-rich processes such as those found in enterprise environments. Known as XProc, the tool provides a standard framework for composing XML processes and helps streamline the automation, sequencing, and management of complex computations.

"XML is tremendously versatile," said Norman Walsh, lead engineer at Mark Logic and one of the co-editors of the XProc specification, in a statement. "Just off the top of my head, I can name standard ways to store, validate, query, transform, include, label, and link XML. What we haven't had is any standard way to describe how to combine them to accomplish any particular task. That's what XProc provides."

The W3C gave an example of where XProc can be used, such as to sequence the following set of operations: whenever a company is mentioned, use a Web service to contact a stock exchange then (3) insert current share prices into the feed and (4) insert background information about the company that has been extracted from a database. In addition, this enhanced feed could be presented in several ways to multiple users including (5) for print or (6) with an interactive form so that people can purchase shares online.

XProc is supported by a test suite that covers all of the required and optional steps of the language, which also includes all the static and dynamic errors.