[Gml4j-devel] improved schema parser

[Aleksandar M. <ami...@ga...>]

Hi All,

I've been trying to improve the spaghetti schema parser part of GML4J. It
seems like I am on the right track, as first tests have shown promising
results. There are also some other changes. The most noticeable will be the
change in the package names because people have complained about
com.galdosinc. I changed it to something less Galdosian com.gmlcentral,
although this domain is also owned by Galdos. Ideally, we'd have the domain
org.gml4j, but we're not committed to only one open-source project, so we'd
like to avoid having to register a domain for each one of them. Let me know
if you strongly dislike this domain name. If nobody complains with good
reason, I'll commit the changes. The old package names will not be used.

I've made the schema parser completely independent of prefixes. Earlier the
XML Schema namespace had to be prefixed with xsd. Now, it can be any prefix,
or no prefix at all for the default namespace. The new parser should also
treat references and global attributes better. There are still issues with
things like enumerations. Not all schema types are correctly supported.

If you have problems with GML4J, let me know. I am thinking about
overhauling the entire object model, and to introduce things like geometry
property, feature property, to provide a more fine-grained distinction
between GML constructs. The DOM-dependent classes will go away. Instead,
there will be new classes that dependend on no other object model. Object
factories will be used for their creation.

In addition, I've upgraded GML4J to the latest libraries (xerces 2.0.1, jdom
beta 8), and replaced werken.xpath with jaxen beta 8. This should provide
better compatability with other newer programs that might use GML4J.

I hope to wrap up the schema parser changes this weekend. For other changes,
you'll have to be more patient.

P.S. I am contemplating publishing the schema parser as a separate API. It
could be useful in non-GML XML applications too.

later
Alex
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