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Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?

• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
• From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
• Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 13:43:20 -0800
• Cc: Jeff Rafter <lists@j...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <p06010207bc5ec1541428@[192.168.254.4]>
• References: <01b201c3f95a$4a6e47a0$6403a8c0@ARIMATHEA> <p06010204bc5e7fd9b1cb@[192.168.254.4]> <4038F4A0.7090503@s...> <p06010207bc5ec1541428@[192.168.254.4]>
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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

>At 10:27 AM -0800 2/22/04, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Can you mention what the main flaws are for Piccolo? I've seen a 
>>number of companies using it, and from what I remember it's also the 
>>basis of the parser used by BEA's NetBeans (now part of Apache, so 
>>that may be changing). Many people would consider BEA's main XML 
>>infrastructure project to be serious work. :-)
>>    
>>
>
>... But several problems with Piccolo include:
>
>1. Inability to recognize ignorable white space.
>2. Use of non-standard ENUMERATION attribute type instead of NMTOKEN
>3. Failure to handle document type declarations that only contain a 
>root element name
>4. Frequent throwing of ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExceptions when 
>encountering various kinds of well-formedness errors
>5. It treats <name/> and <name></name> differently. For <name></name> 
>it calls characters() between startElement and endElement and sets 
>length to 0.
>
>Arguably 1 and 5 are acceptable. I'd love to hear peoples' opinions 
>about 5. Is this legitimate?
>
>  
>
Your standards are perhaps a tad more stringent than those of many 
companies working with XML. AFAIK "ignorable white space" is only 
defined for validating parsers, so I don't see how there's anything 
"arguable" about Piccolo not reporting it (item 1 on your list). 
Likewise with item 5 - I've seen nothing in the SAX specification that 
says a parser can't make a zero-length characters() report whenever it 
feels like it. 2-4 all look like real bugs, though I'd suspect they only 
effect a tiny minority of users. I haven't even seen a single 
application that actually makes use of attribute types, for example. 
It's great that you're tracking down these types of flaws, though, and I 
hope the parser writers correct them.

  - Dennis

• References:
  • Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: "Jeff Rafter" <lists@j...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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