What's the current state of the nation with respect to the XML (W3C compliant) ecosystem for D?

Last months D forum archive had some discussions about std.text.xml or similar (for Phobos) but all in all seems to be no overall plan.  (Whoever was developing seems to have gone AWOL; has Andrei been left with picking up from whoever left off?) Tango doesn't seem to have a grand plan either.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.

To qualify my question, by XML ecosystem I mean all things to do with XML processing and I/O, including parsing, serialization (complete suite of output formats XML/XHTML/HTML/plain text), memory-resident tree model(s), and particularly XSLT 2.0.

Now I can here you all saying, "what planet is this guy on?" but given that D is supposed to be a systems programming language, real world (web) I/O, processing and glue that address contemporary W3C standards are of paramount importance if D is to be taken seriously. (IMHO)

Has Java become the defacto language for doing any of this stuff -- all the tools are available?

Having spent the last week trying to leverage non-Java libraries to get there in D, I'm not even close aside from a successful 2 hour exercise in getting James Clark's Expat XML parser working in D.

Are any of these issues on D developer radars?

On 2009-09-12 11:07:38 -0400, Justin Johansson <procode@adam-dott-com.au> said:

> What's the current state of the nation with respect to the XML (W3C compliant) ecosystem for D?
> 
> Last months D forum archive had some discussions about std.text.xml or similar (for Phobos) but all in all seems to be no overall plan.  (Whoever was developing seems to have gone AWOL; has Andrei been left with picking up from whoever left off?) Tango doesn't seem to have a grand plan either.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> To qualify my question, by XML ecosystem I mean all things to do with XML processing and I/O, including parsing, serialization (complete suite of output formats XML/XHTML/HTML/plain text), memory-resident tree model(s), and particularly XSLT 2.0.

There's a huge jump between XSLT 2.0 and the capability of parsing, serialization and having a tree model.

I started a XML tokenizer and DOM project for D2. In fact, the idea is that it could eventualy replace std.xml in Phobos 2. It's not advancing very fast as I don't have any urgent need of it and I'm busy working on too many things at once. If you're interested in looking at it, here's the documentation:

Tokenizer part: http://michelf.com/docs/d/mfr/xmltok.html
DOM part:       http://michelf.com/docs/d/mfr/xml.html

That's still far from XSLT (I don't have namespaces yet, and even less Xpath), but it's a start. If others want to help developing it, I can share the code and setup what's necessary for collaboration.

> Now I can here you all saying, "what planet is this guy on?" but given that D is supposed to be a systems programming language, real world (web) I/O, processing and glue that address contemporary W3C standards are of paramount importance if D is to be taken seriously. (IMHO)

That depends in which fields you want D to be taken seriously. You don't need a full XML ecosystem everywhere. But a few things I'd like to do with D requires it.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/

Justin Johansson wrote:
> What's the current state of the nation with respect to the XML (W3C compliant) ecosystem for D?
> 
> Last months D forum archive had some discussions about std.text.xml or similar (for Phobos) but all in all seems to be no overall plan.  (Whoever was developing seems to have gone AWOL; has Andrei been left with picking up from whoever left off?) Tango doesn't seem to have a grand plan either.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> To qualify my question, by XML ecosystem I mean all things to do with XML processing and I/O, including parsing, serialization (complete suite of output formats XML/XHTML/HTML/plain text), memory-resident tree model(s), and particularly XSLT 2.0.
> 
> Now I can here you all saying, "what planet is this guy on?" but given that D is supposed to be a systems programming language, real world (web) I/O, processing and glue that address contemporary W3C standards are of paramount importance if D is to be taken seriously. (IMHO)
> 
> Has Java become the defacto language for doing any of this stuff -- all the tools are available?
> 
> Having spent the last week trying to leverage non-Java libraries to get there in D, I'm not even close aside from a successful 2 hour exercise in getting James Clark's Expat XML parser working in D.
> 
> Are any of these issues on D developer radars?
> 
Justin

You might want to consider posting this question on the Tango IIRC

you can use  http://webchat.freenode.net/  to access this.
The channel is   #D.tango

Nick B

Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2009-09-12 11:07:38 -0400, Justin Johansson <procode@adam-dott-com.au> said:
> 
>> What's the current state of the nation with respect to the XML (W3C
>> compliant) ecosystem for D?
>>
>> Last months D forum archive had some discussions about std.text.xml or similar (for Phobos) but all in all seems to be no overall plan. (Whoever was developing seems to have gone AWOL; has Andrei been left with picking up from whoever left off?) Tango doesn't seem to have a grand plan either.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>>
>> To qualify my question, by XML ecosystem I mean all things to do with XML processing and I/O, including parsing, serialization (complete suite of output formats XML/XHTML/HTML/plain text), memory-resident tree model(s), and particularly XSLT 2.0.
>
> There's a huge jump between XSLT 2.0 and the capability of parsing, serialization and having a tree model.

Yar. And XSLT is the only thing about all that xml bullshit that is in anyway interesting. Writing a XSLT processor is a massively none trivial task.

Mind you saxon is written in Java, which was the only XSLT processor I found which did a proper job of it.

It seems on causal thought that it ought to be possible to machine translate it into D, unless Java has under gone massive change since the last time I played with it.

So who's up for writing a Java to D translator?

- --
My enormous talent is exceeded only by my outrageous laziness.
http://www.ssTk.co.uk

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 8:34 PM, div0 <div0@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> It seems on causal thought that it ought to be possible to machine translate it into D, unless Java has under gone massive change since the last time I played with it.
>
> So who's up for writing a Java to D translator?

You mean Tioport?
http://www.dsource.org/projects/tioport

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 8:34 PM, div0 <div0@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>> It seems on causal thought that it ought to be possible to machine translate it into D, unless Java has under gone massive change since the last time I played with it.
>>
>> So who's up for writing a Java to D translator?
> 
> You mean Tioport?
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/tioport

ty for the link, interesting.
Not that I want an XSLT processor at the moment.

- --
My enormous talent is exceeded only by my outrageous laziness.
http://www.ssTk.co.uk