SCXML


SCXML stands for State Chart XML: State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. It is an XML-based markup language that provides a generic state-machine-based execution environment based on Harel statecharts.
SCXML is able to describe complex finite state machines. For example, it is possible to describe notations such as sub-states, parallel states, synchronization, or concurrency, in SCXML.

Goals

The objective of this standard is to genericize state diagram notations that are already used in other XML contexts. For example, it is expected that SCXML notations will replace the State machines notations used in the next CCXML 2.0 version. It could also be used as a multimodal control language in the Multimodal Interaction Activity.
One of the goals of this language is to make sure that the language is compatible with CCXML and that there is an easy path for existing CCXML scripts to be converted to SCXML without major changes to the programming model or document structure.
The current version of the specification was released by the W3C in September 2015.

Applications

According to the W3C SCXML specification, SCXML is a general-purpose event-based state machine language that can be used in many ways, including:
The draft W3C VoiceXML 3.0 specification includes State Chart and SCXML Representation to define functionality.

Multimodal applications

Multimodal application designs can use different modalities for different parts of a communication best suited to it. For example, voice input can be used to avoid having to type on the small screen of a mobile phone, but the screen may be a faster way of communicating a list or map, compared to listening to long descriptions of available options. SCXML makes it easy to do several things in parallel, and the Interaction Manager SCXML application will maintain the synchronization between Voice and Visual dialogues.
The W3C document Authoring Applications for the Multimodal Architecture describes a multimodal system that implements the W3C Multimodal Architecture and gives an example of a simple multimodal application authored using various W3C markup languages, including SCXML, CCXML, VoiceXML 2.1 and HTML.

Implementations

The following implementations are inactive, i.e., the last change to their source code was made more than two years ago:
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