xml-dev - SAX: Distributed Implementations

[David Megginson <ak117@freenet.carleton.ca>]

David Brownell writes:

 > The normal approach is to say that issues like I/O streams are done
 > the usual way for those platforms.  While I've seen some approaches
 > that assume all platforms do I/O the same way, they weren't widely
 > accepted since programmers already "know" how to do I/O and don't
 > really want new APIs that do the standard things in different ways.
 > The value of the common framework isn't for the stuff that already
 > exists (I/O), but for the new stuff (in this case, XML parser
 > callbacks).

I do not understand, though, how this would allow a SAX implementation
to be distributed across several platforms.  Imagine this:

- there is a SAX Parser object implemented in C++ on host A
- there is a SAX application implemented in Java on host B

If the application wants to provide a character stream to the parser
(a very typical case), how can it do so if host A and host B have
implemented character streams differently?  The only solution that I
can imagine is for one of the two to have special knowledge of the
other's implementation language, and to provide a special adapter
class to translate from standard Java I/O to standard C++ I/O; what
would happen, then, if we added host C with a Python implementation,
host D with a Perl implementation, and host E with an ECMAScript
implementation?  Would every host have to have an adapter for every
other host's implementation language?

There may be an obvious solution to this problem -- as I've mentioned
before, I'm very new to CORBA in particular and to distributed
computing in general -- so I'm very grateful for comments from people
with experience in this area.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117@freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins@microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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