Re: [boost] [library process] should we more actively pursue university thesis projects?

From: Valentin Samko (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-06 12:47:26

TO> I could imagine it would help bring forward libraries much faster. I think it
TO> would be reasonable that
TO> the boost comunity provided

TO> 1. project descriptions
TO> 2. help and guidelines throughout the 6-12 months of the project

TO> If we had small papers explaining potential projects, these can be sent to
TO> universities which can the in turn
TO> suggest them to their students.

TO> Off the top of my head, I can think of these projects

TO> 4. An XML parser and generator library

I have written a XML parser/DOM constructor while working on my PhD a
few years ago (I needed to parse/process 100Mb-500Mb XML files as fast as
possible), so one of the main issues was to avoid extra copies of any
strings.

It can also do SAX style parsing, i.e. process incomplete
XML documents and notify the caller about every XML tag. This is
somewhat faster if one only needs a few tags from a huge XML document.

So far, my parser is used in both, university and
commercial environments (I distribute it under boost licence),
so this is not a university project any more.

It can be compiled by Intel C++ 7, g++ 3, VC++ 6, or higher versions.
I have not tried any other compilers.

Although it does some XML validation, this is not a proper validating
parser, since it was more important to keep it fast and lightweight.
It does not support XML namespaces yet, but I have plans to add that.

I do not think it is ready for submission to boost yet(not enough
comments, the code is not clean enough, and I am going to add a few
features/change a few things next month), and I do not know whether
anyone wants such a parser in boost.

If anyone is interested, I will clean it up, add some features,
produce documentation and prepare it for submission/review (hopefully by Christmas).

Valentin Samko
http://val.samko.info