A universal programming platform by extending xml

Author: 
Ghassan El Nemr and Yara AlAli

XML is everywhere: Data Integration, File configuration and Interface definition are areas where XML is intensively present. We may define rules, constraints and configuration settings, or specify graphical interfaces, export data and define rules. This markup language allows the extensibility of any data specification, graphical interface design, or settings storage in an easy and flexible way, which allowed a wide usage of XML in the industry community. Programmers write programs using a learned syntax that depends of a specific language. Languages may share the same paradigm but are different in their syntax and reserved words. Productivity depends of the chosen language, and the developer knowledge of it. Programmers switching from a language to another may build on the paradigm knowledge, however they must learn a new syntax since no flexible universal programming syntax is offered. The purpose of this paper is to offer to the development community a uniform programming platform based on XML, and running on top of different baseline languages and frameworks. By joining a simple language specification to a powerful framework, we reduce the set of required reserved words and syntax mechanisms to learn in a language. We propose a programming platform that increases the productivity while reducing the learning time and error rate. This results in an increase in maintenance quality and rapid development, and code readability.