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Re: NanoXML parser



On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 22:58 +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote:
> Hello Neil and *,
> 
> Since I am fsck'ed with FLASH space I was serachin for a very small  XML
> parser and have found < http://nanoxml.sourceforge.net/>.

The problem would be whether other applications could use it instead of
libxml2 - I doubt it could be a "drop-in" replacement so that could mean
a lot of patches. It would only be worth replacing libxml2 in newly
written applications - at which point you should consider dropping XML
entirely and using something more useful, like sqlite.

(e.g. gpe-expenses, via QOF, has XML and SQLite support but only the
SQLite backend is installed in Emdebian. That said, it is hard to get
any GUI environment that does not bring in libxml2 anyway.)

SQLite is faster than XML, it is more memory efficient than XML, just as
portable, supports easy data conversion into a variety of other formats
and is, IMHO, the defacto standard for embedded system data storage.

> What Do you think about it?

It is empirically "for Java" and hasn't been updated since 2003. It has
been around all that time and nobody has considered packaging it for
Debian yet. Choosing to use it could easily mean that you effectively
become the current upstream maintainer as well as packaging maintainer.

> I personaly think, it could be useful for embedded systems since the XML
> parser availlable in Debian eaating to much space...

I disagree - it could actually waste space and time. libglib2.0-0
includes (arguably) more relevant functionality:

"The "GMarkup" parser is intended to parse a simple markup format that's
a subset of XML. This is a small, efficient, easy-to-use parser. It
should not be used if you expect to interoperate with other applications
generating full-scale XML. However, it's very useful for application
data files, config files, etc. where you know your application will be
the only one writing the file. Full-scale XML parsers should be able to
parse the subset used by GMarkup, so you can easily migrate to
full-scale XML at a later time if the need arises."

Depending on what other applications are going to be installed,
libglib2.0-0 is probably already a dependency within your package set.
Currently, langupdate (providing the locale support within Emdebian)
depends on libglib2.0-0.

With this in mind, newly written code - IMHO - should be targetted at a
small XML parser that explicitly supports later migration to a more
capable XML parser and which is already available in Debian and existing
package sets. Porting existing code to GMarkup or nanoxml is a
non-trivial exercise.

libxml2 is a 1Mb shared library package in Emdebian.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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