[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] ANN: Markup Object Events (MOE)
I'm happy to report that I've finally published an alpha version of Markup Object Events (MOE) [1]. MOE is a Mozilla-licensed Java API and supporting set of classes which supports markup processing using both events and object trees. MOE programs can work purely with events, purely with trees, or with combinations of both, effectively providing a "middle way" between SAX and DOM. MOE emerged from my work over the past summer on SAX filters, notably Regular Fragmentations [2]. I couldn't justify creating DOM trees for the relatively tiny changes I've been making to documents, but SAX's streaming approach made it difficult to do things like modify the attributes of an element based on its contents. I spent a lot of effort building temporary containers, and concluded that the "temporary" containers were interesting in their own right. MOE permits all nodes to have: * A three-part namespace-aware name (prefix, local name, URI - QName available) * Unordered content (a set) - think attributes * Ordered content (a list) - think child elements, text, etc. * Annotations (a map) - any other information you need, largely unconstrained MOE's foundation is very abstract (and defined as interfaces for another level of useful abstraction), but can be readily applied to XML document processing. The abstraction and interface approach make it possible to use MOE to represent non-XML content, to preserve lexical information of all sorts, to represent content which is not well-formed, and to create annotated object models which host information which may not have any lexical representation. This alpha release focuses more simply on an Infoset-like view of XML - something like the SAX2 view of XML. Developers can use MOE as storage for information from SAX events, or they can create complete trees built from MOE events. Nodes can listen to flows of information, building a tree structure, and report when they have "finished" - when an element reaches its end tag, for instance. Those nodes can then be reported again as a stream of MOE (or SAX) events, converting the tree back into events. While it is possible to use MOE in place of SAX or DOM (given a parser), it was designed to complement those approaches, not replace them. The current API supports only tree-walking navigation, not XPath or similar conveniences. For small trees it's fine, but for large trees it won't be much fun. MOE is still pretty raw. It's had a little bit of review from a few people, and has benefited greatly from that, but I suspect there's a lot more review to come. I feel reasonably comfortable with the logic of the core (hence the alpha relase), but the visitor, adapter, and factory classes are still prone to wild gyrations. Namespace support - especially declaration management - has also proven trickier than expected, though that's not a huge surprise. There is also a very simple Swing application - MOEWorkshop - which lets you explore MOE trees visually, but it still has a very long way to go to become the debugging tool for chains of MOE processing that I want. MOE owes a great deal in spirit to various work done by the Python and Perl communities. While I work primarily in Java, hearing about the various tools for working with partial trees in Python and Perl inspired much of this work. MOE is deliberately written in what I call "naive Java". Given that I expect MOE to change substantially over time, I've opted to focus on clarity rather than performance. I've attempted to create a class structure which separates particular kinds of processing from the basic object model, but I've undoubtedly made some slips as well. I'd also like to develop a comprehensive set of unit tests, but haven't yet had time to do so. (The tests I have are very simple.) I'll be rewriting many of my SAX filters to use MOE over the next few months, starting with Regular Fragmentations. I'm hoping that applying MOE to a wide variety of general problems will help me evolve it into a more powerful toolkit over time. Comments, suggestions, queries, and contributions are all welcome. CVS and mailing lists are available through the MOE SourceForge project page [3]. [1] - http://moe.sourceforge.net/ [2] - http://simonstl.com/projects/fragment/ [3] - http://sourceforge.net/projects/moe/ Simon St.Laurent Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates http://simonstl.com
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