Re: [Rails-devel] XML data files

[Brett L. <wak...@ea...>]

>I know from experience that as XML files become large, it can become very 
>difficult to edit them or write them accurately - lots of simple mistakes 
>creep in and unless a lot of effort is put into the parsing software, the 
>error messages can bear no relation to the root cause.

Yep. I've experienced this pain too. That's what brought me to suggest=
 breaking out each 
major class into it's own XML settings file.

>Rulesets have to be human readable and modifiable, so XML is a good
>choice. 
>However, for saving the state of the game, I think that Java Serialization=
 
>would be a better choice. The volume of data involved is relatively small 
>and the coding for straightforward serialization is simple, certainly 
>several times less effort than mapping all objects in and out of XML.

Sounds good. I agree that the mapping a save file to XML will probably be a=
 lot of work. So, 
if there's a simpler way, I'd favor using it.


---Brett