Overview
XML Open Studio is an end user data collection and aggregation tool based around
XML documents. The idea being that, without writing code, a user could source data from a
variety of sources (databases, web services, files etc.) and define relationships between these
documents to produce an aggregate/composite document.
To put that in the context of an example: imagine you have a set of addresses in a MySQL database and
you have a web service that, given a ZIP code, returns local weather information. Using this tool you
can connect to the MySQL database and retrieve the addresses and then call the webservice passing it
the ZIP codes and combine the results into a single XML document. You can then design a report
that dresses up this information however you wish.
Given the wide variety of data sources envisaged (the data source system is entirely modular so in theory you
could retrieve data from anywhere) its unlikely that all forms of data viewing will be supported in the
data source. For example a web service may not provide facilities in its API for changing sort orders
or calculate totals.
The studio is broken into two main sections that the IDE simply glues together: data sourcing and aggregation being one half,
and reporting and document manipulation being the other. A developer can take both halves and easily embed them
in there own projects to utilise this functionality as they choose (including to run things designed in the IDE in
other contexts).