Posted on by Tony Graham

XML Summer School 2012

Inasmuch as last year’s sessions were both enjoyable and well received, I’m teaching two sessions at XML Summer School again in September this year.

One, in the XSLT and XQuery track, is an update of the Developing and Testing in XSLT talk, again alongside Jeni Tennison, that got us such a good review last year:

Unit tests, pro­fil­ing, debug­ging and, increas­ingly, test-driven devel­op­ment are part of the bread and but­ter of work­ing with other pro­gram­ming lan­guages but are not always so with XSLT or XQuery. In test-driven devel­op­ment, which is a fun­da­mental part of agile approaches to soft­ware devel­op­ment, the developers write tests that describe the desired beha­viour of their applic­a­tion, then write code that meets the tests. This style of devel­op­ment keeps code focused, avoids break­ing exist­ing code and facil­it­ates refactoring.

In this ses­sion, Jeni Ten­nison and Tony Gra­ham will describe both the state of the art in test­ing and debug­ging XSLT and XQuery and how test-driven devel­op­ment applies to XSLT and XQuery devel­op­ment. In par­tic­u­lar, they will focus on the use of the XSpec test­ing framework.

The other, in the Publishing track, is XML and Publishing Workflows:

Some formats are bet­ter or worse than oth­ers for cap­tur­ing and/or rep­res­ent­ing the inform­a­tion for pub­lish­ing pur­poses. Can you cre­ate and man­age life-cycle work­flows which ration­al­ise or reg­u­lar­ise mixes of formats using XSLT and other XML tool­sets? Should XML be the begin­ning of your pub­lish­ing work­flow, the hub format in the middle, the res­ult, or all three? How can XSLT and related tools be used to cover up the defi­cien­cies or excesses of the source XML? What are the argu­ments for mov­ing authors towards sub­mit­ting in XML (or not)? For mov­ing editors?

Incor­por­at­ing both live examples and war stor­ies, Tony Gra­ham will lead an exam­in­a­tion of XML in pub­lish­ing work­flows, the advant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages of using XML at each stage, and some of the tools and tech­niques avail­able to you.

XML Sum­mer School 2012 is on Septem­ber 16–21 2012 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford Uni­ver­sity.