ActiveXML

Another technology that offers a bridge between  XML and general-purpose programming languages releases a new version.

ActiveXML is a component-oriented development framework that allows to define Java-based components as XML elements, manage interaction between such components, provide common logging, design and execution patterns. ActiveXML development environment is completely XML based and therefore offers easy to read and process way to define applications. ActiveXML incorporates interpreter-based and runtime compiled language - XSSL - eXtensible Server Side Language, which is the core of the framework and the main component that allows for definition and interoperation of various active components.

ActiveXML defines a series of well defined layers in its model:

Access Module Layer (AM)
ActiveXML VM Layer (AVM)
ActiveXML Logging Service Layer (ALS)
ActiveXML Component Validation Layer (ACV)
ActiveXML Java Component Layer (XJC)
ActiveXML Definition Document Layer (XDD)

You can check ActiveXML here.

ActiveXML represents an interesting choice that complements established technologies like JAXB or XML Beans. In the future I think that we will have technologies that mixes the concepts in XML, SQL with general-purpose languages without necessarily  abstract the XML representation to a class hierarchy. This is the objective of Comega and some of this features will appear in C# 3.