XML ecosystem wrt D

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-09-12 11:07:38 -0400, Justin Johansson <procode at 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 at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/