Re: [boost] Proposal: XML APIs in boost

From: Graham Bennett (graham-boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-09 20:22:28

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 11:45:29AM +0100, Jose wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Graham Bennett <graham-boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > IMO a streaming interface is much more important than DOM as a
> > starting point - one can easily and efficiently build a DOM from a
> > stream, but starting with an in-memory representation of a document
> > usually precludes streaming. There are a number of XML applications
> > where it is not desirable or possible to hold the entire document in
> > memory at once.  A reader interface has advantages over SAX in that
> > it is much easier to program with. It's very easy to do things like
> > implement decorators around readers, and to write generic code that
> > just understands how to use a reader and doesn't care how the XML is
> > actually stored.
> 
> 
> I completely agree. I think the basic interface should be a reader
> interface.  Also as per my previous post, this basic interface would
> not have any dependencies on external libraries like libxml2, which I
> think is very bad for a boost library, not to mention the licensing
> issues !

Yes, some degree of separation is a must.  Libxml2 is a very good and
portable library, but explicit dependencies are a bad thing, especially
if they can be avoided easily.

> I think a very simple way to look at this is based on the XML file
> size
> 
> reader API --> any file SAX API --> any file DOM API --> small files
> in memory
> 
> So we should start with the general solution and build on top of that.
> Also, has anybody check the Spirit XML examples.
> 
> wouldn't a reader API + spirit give an entry point to a big percentage
> of the XML problem domain ?

The reader api would give you the entry point, a spirit-based parser
implementation (I'm no spirit expert) would seem to make sense as
default implementation to provide with Boost, so as not to add any more
dependencies.

Thanks,

Graham

-- 
Graham Bennett