Re: [boost] [Boost Review] Property Tree Library

From: Marcin Kalicinski (kalita_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-19 17:32:24

> I think it could use some expanding upon. First, as was already mentioned, 
> the index needs to be broken
>up into smaller topics. Next I think there should be more discussion 
>(tutorial) on customizing the library.

I agree there is little docs on customizing the library. The reason is I 
underestimated interest people will take in that part of the library. Also, 
customization support was added quite late in the development. I probably 
thought too much along the lines of my own use of the library - I never 
needed to use the customization features.

>>       * What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness
>>         of the library?
> Great! My opinion is that this library is going to see far more usage than 
> just what it was
>intended for. My initial reaction when I looked at it is that it's more of 
>a generic hierarchical
>tree, moreover, once you've populated your tree you can save it off and 
>come back to it another
>day. Just taking those two aspects into consideration opens the door to a 
>lot of possibilities, far
>more than just reading configuration data.

In some of my past projects I used it as a primitive serialization library, 
where data files are human editable (and creatable). This is hard to achieve 
using boost::serialization, even with XML archive, because 
boost::serialization serializes lots of housekeeping information, which is 
in not easy to grok by human (like class-id integers or tracking ids).

Another use of ptree was in a program where user interface was communicating 
with the "working" part of the program by means of property trees. This 
allowed running the "working" part alone (without the interface) - it was 
transparently reading ptrees from the disk instead of getting them from 
interface.

Thank you,
Marcin