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Program Generators with XML and Java
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Author: J. Craig Cleaveland
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0130258784
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (07 February, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 112,645
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
A shallow scattered attempt
I can only assume that Mr. Cleaveland was attempting to woo the legions of Web site developers into writing program generators (PG) with this book. The book centers around a pointless example of how to generate pop-up web pages which call each other when their respective buttons are pressed.
Out of the 13 chapters, 3 are worth mentioning. Chapters 4, 6, and 7 deal with what to consider when writing a PG and how to make it flexible and Mr. Cleveland does bring some worthwhile points to the table. Throughout the other chapters, trivial code snippets are given of how to write the code (in Java, DOM, and XSLT) to generate the pages, however, because the examples are so simplistic any one who knows these languages would know how to write them anyway.
In the future, I would strongly recommend the following:
1. Give examples that people will actually want to use
2. Give examples that highlight your points
3. Get rid of chapters 2 and 3 (domain analysis), they are useless.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Hits Right Balance
Cleaveland hits just the right balance in his unique
book on program generators. Just look at the negative reviews.
The review by Carpenter whines about not getting enough XML
in his book. Thank God, Cleaveland doesn't waste
our time and money on just learning XML. There are
plenty of other books that do that. Cleaveland
rightly focuses on how to apply XML to Program
Generators. The other negative review, "Soso", whines
about the exact opposite; that there is too much XML.Again, thank God, Cleaveland doesn't do that either,
but rather shows the proper role of XML in the
design of Program Generators, namely that XML is
an abstraction interface for the separation of concerns
between expressing specifications
and transforming specifications. Kudos to
Cleaveland for getting it just right!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Beginners Only
The ideal reader for this book would know Java, but would know nothing about program generators (or compilers) and nothing about XML. They'd want to take things slowly, and wouldn't mind if they didn't get very far. In return, they'd get a surprisingly long introduction to "domain analysis", a decent medium-length introduction to XML and XSL, a quick look at using the Java DOM parser for XML, and some examples. I was disappointed with the lack of discussion of program generator basics, most fundamentally when to write a program generator versus when to write an interpreter, a parametric program, or as is more typically required, some mix of these approaches. And what about wizards, the most transparent modern incarnation of program generators? And how does this all interact with frequency of program generation and version control? There was no discussion of programming language basics like semantic versus syntactic well-formedness and error reporting, which have their peculiarities in XML and Java. A primary concern with the whole XML (not to mention Java) enterprise is scalability. There was no discussion of writing efficient program generators; SAX is only mentioned in passing! Even more surprisingly, there is no discussion of generating efficient code, the latter being a primary motivator for many program generation efforts. Despite the daunting number of pages, this book can be read in one sitting due to the huge font and wide margins.
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