Re: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?

["Mukul Gandhi" <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

Hi Philippe,
   This is all very cool. I'll surely take time to learn about RefleX.

On Feb 18, 2008 10:42 PM, Philippe Poulard
<philippe.poulard@sophia.inria.fr> wrote:
> Mukul Gandhi a écrit :
> > The problem I was having is - Given a root directory, I needed to
> > generate a XML hierarchy depicting the file system hierarchy, starting
> > from the given root. I wrote a recursive Java program and converted
> > the information to XML, using Xerces DOM implementation.
> >
> > Some of the directory/file names didn't conform to the XML name
> > conventions. Like, some directory names started with numeric. Some
> > contained characters like - (hyphen), ~ etc.
> >
> > Would somebody agree with me, that XML names should allow such rules?
> > My problem could serve as a use case ...
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> When people have to process a non-XML structure as XML, they try to
> invent some tags that are constraints by XML rules ; as you said, some
> of the directory/file names doesn't conform to the XML names.
>
> Additionally, when you dump a structure such as a file system to a
> markup representation, you'd have enough time to take a coffee if you
> start from the root...
>
> My own thoughts lead me to the following : it's much more better to deal
> with the data model rather than to cope with the tags, you will be able
> to relax some constraints that you dislike for a specific usage.
>
> This is what I've done in RefleX :
> http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/
> A file system is an XML-friendly object : you can apply XPath
> expressions on it.
>
> For example, start with a given directory :
> <xcl:set name="dir" value="{io:file('file:///some/dir/')}"/>
>
> Then get a file within :
> $dir/someDoc.xml
> $dir/subdir/someDoc.xml
> $dir/../../subdir/someDoc.xml
>
> Get a set of files :
> $dir/*
> $dir//*
> $dir//*[@io:extension='xml']
> $dir//*[name(..) !=
> 'WEB-INF'][@io:extension='xml']$dir//*[@io:extension='xml' and @io:size
>  > 1024]
>
> Have to deal with an illegal XML name ?
> $dir/*[name()='An illegal XML name but a valid file name']
>
> In RefleX, the entire file system won't be mapped to tags, the system
> will access only to the directories involved in the navigation during
> the XPath evaluation.
>
> If you argue that the Unix "find" command can do the job, I'll answer
> that (1) it works only on Unix, (2) it works only on a local file system
> whereas RefleX works as well on http, ftp, webdav, zip, tar... (3) you
> don't have to learn an obscure syntax, it's XPath !!!
>
> Enjoy !
>
>
> --
> Cordialement,
>
>               ///
>              (. .)
>  --------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
> |      Philippe Poulard       |
>  -----------------------------
>  http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/
>        Have the RefleX !
>



-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi