A few quick comments:
1) verbose -- yes, Java is Java; the JavaScript, Common Lisp, and (old) Ruby versions look like those languages, and are correspondingly less verbose.
2) namespaces -- These are the links to Java packages (or the corresponding concept in the other languages). I didn't want to get into the details of how this mapping works in an introductory article. Basically the generator needs to know what package to put things into so there has to be a mapping from a namespace to a package. Currently you
can resolve "" to a package -- I wanted to get the typical use (which is in a large system and so, in Java, it will be broken into different packages). There is also a way to specify a 'default' namespace for
generation. As I say, this is for the generation phase only. When you are actually running there is no need to specify a namespace in the XML, xampl will work it out (though it is the programmers responsibility to resolve ambiguities).
3) Xampl only requires XML for the configuration but even that is optional, you could have written it in either Java or JavaScript in the Java version of xampl (or CL (or sexpr soon) in the CL version, Ruby in the Ruby version).
4) From my point of view xampl doesn't
require framework code, it
is framework code... and I'll argue that that is a Good Thing.
5) I've considered dynamic code generation for CL and Ruby but I've not quite made up my mind on this one. I don't know if I can make that fit with the rest of what xampl provides.
6) I have not yet said what xampl is really doing, by the way. This binding stuff is incidental, in other words, it is not the primary purpose of xampl.
7) Rhino compiles to Java byte codes, so it isn't as bad as a reasonable person might imagine. It is faster than Ruby for what we do with it, don't know about in general -- Ruby is more than fast enough for what we do with it. The overhead of switching between Java and JavaScript is very small when running, a lot of that is handled at compile time (that's what the 'rhinoizing' stuff is all about -- as far as I can tell, the typical case is a method call, though sometimes you have to poke around in JavaScript's world of prototypes and scopes to find things).
8) From my point of view one of the nice side effects of this recent trend to accept dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, even Common Lisp and Smalltalk is that some of the crazy binding schemes in Java can be seen to be crazy :-)
These comments are briefer than I'd like them to be, but I have time constraints due to work that have to come first today. I've
duplicated these comments on my weblog and will update that post to point at the expanded comments. This is where trackbacks and pingbacks came in handy -- to bad they are pretty much useless these days because of spam.