Re: [xml-dev] Packaging (was Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability)

["Fred L. Drake, Jr." <fdrake@acm.org>]

David Megginson wrote:
 >                                                     The problem is
 > that ZIP is non-streaming -- you have to download the entire zip file
 > before you can start processing it, since the directory information is
 > at the end.

David Brownell writes:
 >     - The JAR manifest is directory info that's required to be at
 >       the beginning, specifically to avoid downloading the whole
 >       thing before processing it.

  I wasn't aware that the manifest is required to come first, but
that's good to know.  I did work on a project a few years ago where we
used a JAR-like format to transport mobile agents, and used a decoder
that parsed the data stream as it was received; this worked quite
well.  Something like this could be used with a multi-threaded model
without too much difficulty, and the thread requiring data should
easily be able to get data once decoded from the stream.

 >     - Maybe someone else knows whether that's actually relied
 >       on, except maybe inside the JDK's class loader.

  It wouldn't be too hard re-implement for Python.  The code we wrote
to do it back then was pretty crufty and is too license-encumbered to
be useful now.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation