A posting from Eve L. Maler announces a sample implementation of the W3C XML Pipeline Definition Language, available from the Sun Microsystems Developer Connection. A 2001-10-26 'Pipeline' submission from ten W3C member companies was recently acknowledged and published by W3C in the form of a Note: XML Pipeline Definition Language Version 1.0. As defined in the Note, a Pipeline is "an XML vocabulary for describing the processing relationships between XML resources; a pipeline document specifies the inputs and outputs to XML processes and a pipeline controller uses this document to figure out the chain of processing." The Sun Preview Version 1.0 application developed by Ed Mooney is a free, Java, "Ant-based sample implementation of an XML Pipeline controller; this controller implementation can be used to manage validations, transformations, and similar XML processes." The distribution includes binary code, source code, and documentation.

The Pipeline document recently published as a Note was submitted to W3C by Sun Microsystems, Inc., Alis Technologies, Inc., Arbortext, Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Fujitsu Limited, Markup Technology, Ltd., Oracle Corporation, Propylon, SAP AG, and Software AG.

From the W3C announcement: The 'Pipeline' submission from ten W3C member companies describes the features and syntax for a proposed XML Pipeline Definition Language. Pipeline is "an XML vocabulary for describing the processing relationships between XML resources. A pipeline document specifies the inputs and outputs to XML processes and a pipeline controller uses this document to figure out the chain of processing that must be executed in order to get a particular result. For example, you can use a pipeline document to specify that the XML messages coming into a business transaction hub must be validated and augmented with datatype information using XML Schema, then transformed with XSLT to bring them into a hub language, then queried for various purposes... a pipeline document could be used to control the behavior of a SOAP actor, a complex publishing application, or an upgrade to new versions of XML vocabularies, [making] applications of the Pipeline language are as broad as XML applications themselves." The Note will be brought to the attention of the W3C XML Core Working Group and the XML Signature Working Group. Declarations from the ten companies making the submission offer the technology 'Royalty-Free' under terms defined by the submission request.