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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] What should TrAX look like? (Was: Re: Article on JAXP 1.3"Fast
 I think we've all implicitly agreed that Source is pretty useless. The primary argument in its favor has been a lot of hand waving and pointing at some .NET thing, and saying, "That's even worse" but nobody's really stepped up to defend Source on its own merits. Here's a perhaps more useful question. Could we define an alternate source interface that would allow validators, transformers, and query tools to hook into arbitrary models? Specifically, could we define one that would be complete, unlike Source; and would not require these tools to provide special support for each different object model? What would such an interface look like? It is, I admit, a hard problem. I suspect it could be solved for tree-based models by defining some sort of interface based on the XPath data model. I am not at all sure it's possible to define this for streaming models as well, but perhaps it is. Possibly the issues of transforms are different from query tools and validators. All transform engines I've seen build their own internal model. They do not work directly on top of DOM, SAX, XOM, or other things. Validators and query tools, by contrast, tend not to construct new object models and do work directly on top of the preexisting in-memory representations of the XML document. If that's an accurate characterization (I'm not sure it is) then the needs of transforms would be served by a single interface that just streamed entire documents into the engine, because the engine is going to build a new model anyway. On the other hand, query tools might want a wrapper around an existing tree model that they could query. Validators could probably work with either. I'm not sure it's possible to satisfy all use cases with one or other, but maybe it's possible. If not, perhaps we could get away with two interfaces instead? e.g. replace SAXSource and DOMSource with StreamSource and TreeSource. These would be read-only interfaces that would provide full access to what's needed for the XPath data model. Each model could implement one interface or the other. Tools could support one or the other, but I think most would support both. However, they would only need to support both. The would not need to specially support JDOMTreeSource, XOMTreeSource, DOMTreeSource, SAXStreamSource, StAXStreamSource, XNIStreamSource, etc. Does this seem plausible? Does this seem worth doing? Does anyone have any other ideas? -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim 
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