xml-dev - Re: XML Parser with DOM in C

["Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>]

 From: David E. Cleary <davec@progress.com>

>I'm looking for a C based XML parser with the DOM API to license.
Doesn't
>have to be free or open source. Or is anybody working on putting the
DOM on
>top of expat besides Mozilla?

I have been working on something like this. Please contact me for
information. This is *not* a product announcement.

DOM is a very simple and generic interface system, aimed at access to
already-built trees (e.g., GROVES). It is a little contradictory that
DOM uses IDL, and hence is useful for networked access to tree objects,
since that is what XML was for too! I guess XML is for loosely-coupled
systems...

The kinds of decisions you need to make with implementing DOM in C
include:
    * is it part of a distributed object systems (e.g. CORBA) (mine
isnt);
    * do you really want to use wide chars rather than UTF-8 (for C,
there are many good readons to keep with UTF-8 as much as possible);
    * what is your implementation of an object reference) (if there is
no networking, it can be a pointer);
    * what is your implementation of the underlying data structures
(which implies an idea of the probable uses of your system); this is in
fact the biggest part;
    * do you really want to pass the environment back (if you are not in
multi-threaded or CORBA, why not just pass errors back in a global,
instead of wasting a function argument?)

Why would anyone be interested in a C non-CORBA DOM?  Well, the reasons
I would give are:
    * to have consistant (but highly generic) access to structures
regardless of the DTD, and regardless of the markup notation used (XML,
CGM); there are generic operations (e.g., asking the type of an element
node) which a generic inteface should be well appropriate for;
  * to be able to upgrade to a distributed object implementation in the
future; if you are like me, maybe you don't care or need to learn CORBA
at the moment,  but you would like you program to use the basic DOM
operations;
   * you have to use C and you do not need CORBA.

Rick Jelliffe




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