[Config4gnu-developer] Using Xerces for the DOM Interface

[Jason L. <jl...@me...>]

Justin:

I have downloaded the C++ Xerces from xml.apache.org, compiled it, and got a
little prototype to work with it. I think it will suit.

Since the library is C++ I decided to do this prototype using Gtk-- (C++
bindings for Gtk+). It's taking me some time to get used to the C++ ways of
doing things; I'm finding it a little confusing. Code will be committed to
CVS once I figure out how to integrate these new dependencies into the
automake/autoconf system.

For those on the list, I'd like to take this opportunity to bring you up to
speed with what's going on and to apologize that not much has been said on
the mailing list recently :)

First of all, Justin and I have put a lot of work recently into an
"implementation" document, which is basically a guide for how the system
will work and is more detailed than anything we've done so far. We want to
make this document as detailed as possible, because it's a lot easier to
make changes to this document than it is to make changes to code. The
implementation document (DocBook format) is in CVS in
website/docs/implementation/implementation.sgml. It can be viewed on the web
at http://config4gnu.sourceforge.net/docs/implementation/.

Second, this email about Xerces is a result of a proposal to use a more
feature-rich XML library than libxml. If you look at the website
xml.apache.org, you'll see that Xerces implements the DOM interfaces, and
supports XML Schema. Unfortunately there are no C-bindings for it, which
means our project would use C++ (if we decide to make this change).

Another nice thing about Xerces is that there are already Perl bindings for
it, so we could use the same XML library for the Config4GNU library (written
in C++) as the backends (which use Perl).

We welcome your feedback (particularly concerning Xerces because our
experience with it so far is very limited).

I will also try to post this information as a SourceForge news item so our
website will be updated as well.

Jason