Re: C and other non "standard" DOM language bindings

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 10:45:36AM -0400, Michael Champion wrote:
> Getting to my main  point ... I'm wondering about C language bindings for
> the DOM.  I know that Oracle has published one ... and the XML C Library for
> Gnome is DOM-like, but not really an attempt to be a complete,
> vendor-neutral C DOM binding as far as I can tell.

 Maybe i should report a bit on this. At least for archival/historical
purposes.

The libxml [1] parser builds a tree in memory which is a 'naive' representation
of the interfaces in the specification (no hash tables, no fancy stuff).
The original goal was to try to couple this with simple CORBA stubs
to allow ubiquitous access to any structure available in memory.
I wrote an early implementation [2] using the IDL to C stubber to
generate the interfaces. Raph Levien tried to use it for an
early version of his SVG renderer Gill [3] and immediately found that
this suffered a very fundamental problem: by browsing the XML document
through this API one would collect on the client side as many proxy
objects for the real objects than there were elements and attributes
in the real document. And there was no way to recollect this memory.

A new DOM module [4] was generated but without CORBA and using direct
function accesses. Of course the portability of the API somewhat got
lost since it's not using anymore on only "official" C mapping for 
DOM which is based on the IDL compiler for C. On the good side, once
DOM had been debugged a bit, turning the SVG renderer into a basic
editor was less than 30 lines of code, binding the mouse event and
calling the libxml save function on exit, that was very cool !

With the release of the libxml2 version, the work had been simplified
to implement a DOM APIs on top of libxml, and there is a new
module which is supposed to implement DOM 1 with HTML support and
the Event part of DOM 2. But again we don't expect to use CORBA,
and in that case it's quite hard to justify the horrid names that
the IDL compiler would generate. The libxml2 framework is now ready if
support for DTD access or Saving function is added in DOM3 and if
some of the Gnome hackers need those functionnalities,

Daniel

[1] http://xmlsoft.org/
[2] http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=gnome-dom
[3] http://www.levien.com/svg/
[4] http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=gdome

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Received on Friday, 25 August 2000 14:00:43 UTC