Re: What to do in order to make the gnome development platform rock.

[Murray Cumming <Murray_Cumming betaresearch de>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 03:24:06PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > org.gnome.xml                           - libxml (if it makes sence to
> > > bind)
> >
> > Probably not. We shouldn't force the use of any particular parser,
> > particularly when the language may have it's own parsers. I find it very
> > annoying that QT (a GUI toolkit) contains an XML parser and a database
> > API.
> 
>   Show me with the standardized APIs how to:
>     - do a posteriori validation of a modified document
>     - use/manipulate XML Catalogs
>     - run an XSLT processing (API not standardized at the Java level within
>       W3C).

I can't because I don't even know what the first 2 are.

>  I think I can in confidence point you to a number of *required* APIs
> used *right now* for Gnome (2.0) which have no equivalent in W3C APIs.
> And that's not a surprize because W3C don't do APIs standardization
> unless forced (for good reasons too).
> 
>  So you're suggesting to use Java native tools for those operation,
> when available which is not the default since those are added packages.
> I'm sorry, a number of people came to libxml/libxslt telling me that
> Xerces/Xalan APIs sucks, they are my customer base, I trust them, and
> if they want to do a Java binding (within or outside the Gnome project)
> I very much welcome their effort !

Sure if it adds something then there should definitely be bindings. You
can't reuse what isn't there. I have no objection to bindings for
libxml, particularly if it has functionality not found elsewhere. If
that extra functionality is useful outside of GNOME then that seems like
even more reason not to put it in the gnome namespace. I'm not really
bothered, by the way.

I would hope that any bindings would interoperate well with any existing
standardised equivalents, so that you could (if you wanted to) use the
standard interface for simple XML parsing and then use the same objects
with the Java libxml when you need the extra functionality. This seems
to be equivalent to the new utf8 string in Gtk-- which does utf8 but can
be used almost seemlessly with the standard string which can't do utf8.
I don't know enough about the Java XML parser APIs to know whether this
is really possible, so feel free to ignore me.

-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net