Date: Nov. 13, 1998
Link: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/formula/bml
Source Author or Organization: IBM (alphaWorks)

Excerpted from web site: "Bean Markup Language (BML) is an XML-based component configuration or wiring language customized for the JavaBean component model."

"Bean Markup Language (BML) is an instance of an XML-based component configuration or wiring language customized for the JavaBean component model. The language is designed to be directly executable; i.e., processing a BML script will result in a running application configured as described in the script. The BML language has elements that can be used to describe the creation of new beans, accessing of new beans, configuration of beans by setting/getting their properties and/or fields, binding of events from some beans to other beans as well as calling of arbitrary methods in beans."

"We provide two implementations of BML - the first is an interpreter that "plays" a BML script to create the desired bean hierarchy (which is then a running application). This is implemented using reflection and is very small approximately a 35K jar file (without class compression)."

"The second implementation is a compiler that compiles any BML script into reflection-free Java code. The advantage of this is that it allows one to capture the inter-component structure of the application using a first-class language designed for that purpose and yet be able to compile it into "regular" Java code with basically no performance loss."