Re: [boost] [xml] XML Reader Interface

From: Jose (jmalv04_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-28 13:56:40

On 10/28/06, Sebastian Redl <sebastian.redl_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Once again I'm turning to the list for discussion about a design issue
> in the XML library. This time I hope to avoid any discussion about the
> implementation on the library and focus on interface only.
>
> The interface in question is the reader interface, also known as pull
> interface. Like SAX, the pull interface is an event-based interface.
> There are a few event types (roughly, StartElement, EndElement,
> Characters, and a few more for other XML features), all of which provide
> come with some additional data: the element name, the character data, etc.

The criteria I would apply for choosing the interface are:

- performance
- custom-parsing simplicity
- extensibility

Based on this the best interface is 1) .

I think the best approach is to learn from the C++ XmlPullParser  that you
mention in your
September 7 thread: http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xgws/xsoap/xpp/
What is missing is the ability to handle partial files + good UNICODE
support + optimizations

If you agree that performance is a key requirement, at which XPP already
excels, then
you might want to focus on the recent ideas for creating an XML tree without

memory allocations.

http://www.nathanm.com/2006/09/15/techniques-for-parsing-xml-documents.html

Once you have the XML stored in a tree it is viable to implement path and
query
operators which are really necessary.

I'm glad you're tackling the xml library as this is an area I find the C++
community is behind
the Java .NET camps

regards