[Tclxml-devel] TclXML Roadmap

[Steve B. <Ste...@zv...>]

Now that TclDOM & TclXSLT v2.2 have been released,
I thought it might be helpful to provide a roadmap
for future development of the TclXML family;
at least the part that I'm responsible for.

Most of my effort has been concentrated on libxml2/libxslt
support.  This will continue into the future.

In the short-term I'm planning on releasing v2.2
of the TclXML package.  This should (must) occur before the
Tcl Conference.  This release will simply catch-up on
bug fixes, patches, etc, that have been backlogged.
I only just realised that it's been over a year since the
last TclXML release :-(

After that the next phase will be to work on a v3.0
release of all the packages.  There are two major
changes planned:

i.   move libxml2 support into the TclXML package.
      This will allow access to the SAX interface of
      the parser, as well as validation support, XPath,
      etc.

ii.  Revamp the TclDOM API.  The "generic-layer" concept
      hasn't really worked out very well, so I'm dropping
      it.  There will be no notion of loading multiple
      DOM implementations into a single Tcl interpreter.
      Instead, a single implementation will provide all
      of the features of the API and the package loading
      mechanism will take care of finding a package to load.

      The issue of node Tcl commands also rears its ugly
      head (ala tDOM).  The current implementation of
      TclDOM/libxml2 creates hash tables to keep track of
      node string reps, and I suspect that there are
      no efficiency gains in not defining Tcl commands
      for DOM nodes.  I will do some experimentation.

As noted on the website, version numbers for TclXML,
TclDOM and TclXSLT will be synchronised.  In future,
all three will be released simultaneously, just like
Tcl and Tk.

Of course, I have no timetable at this stage for the
v3.0 release.

Please send your comments,
Steve Ball

-- 
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