Re: [Refdb-users] User feedback 3

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

David Nebauer writes:
 > At this point may I make a bold suggestion: the addition to refdb of a 
 > refdbxml configuration/init file, presumably .refdbxmlrc.  This would 
 > have the following advantages:
 > 
 > 1. Rather than directly editing refdbxml, as is necessary now if you 
 > want to changes xslt processors, you can instead nominate the processor 
 > to use in the config file.  This makes your choices upgrade-proof.  You 
 > could either have saxon and saxon-xerces as choices for the processor, 
 > or you could have a separate variable (use-xerces) in the init file.
 > 
 > 2. If you add support for FOP, there needs to be a way to nominate which 
 > FO processor to use.  An init file makes this easy.
 > 
 > 3. I would dearly love to see it possible to nominate, in this init 
 > file, a classpath specific to each java application.  Perhaps the use of 
 > variables such as: saxon-classpath, xalan-classpath, xerces-classpath 
 > and fop-classpath.  These classpaths could be extracted by refdbxml and 
 > used as a -cp command-line option when invoking the relevant processor.
 > 
 > My thinking here is that, with 4 java-based apps in potential use 
 > (saxon, xalan, xerces and fop) the current "common classpath" stands to 
 > become increasingly complex.  Relying on a single classpath variable for 
 > increasing numbers of java applications is difficult to debug, difficult 
 > to maintain, unwieldy, inelegant and just plain _messy_ .
 > 

This is my favourite rant about Java ;-)
 > 
 > My powers of shellscript-fu are a little stronger than my (pathetic) 
 > xsl-fu, and I could try to knock up a "proof-of-concept" if you are 
 > inclined to look into my suggestion.
 > 

I strongly encourage you to whip up a proof of concept. The shell
magic to read config files is not that hard BTW, the db2ris script
shows an example how to do this.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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