From: Ryan Leavengood <RyanL@...>
Date: 2001-11-10T05:10:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24799] Re: ruby and webservices

> The expat license seems to allow this with no restrictions. If we
> include expat and xmlparser, then is people wanted higher-level XML
> interfaces could they build on this?

That seems to be the trend in the Java world.  A few organizations
create fairly low level libraries that implement SAX and DOM, and then
others use those to build higher level libraries.

An API that I have used for XML in Java is JDOM, which by default uses
the Apache Xerces XML parser, but can also be used with other SAX or DOM
compliant parsers (last time I used it at least.)  It seems similar in
philosophy to Electric XML, providing a much more convenient API than
standard SAX or DOM.

I think this same approach could be used for Ruby.  We can create a
fairly low level API that the higher level libraries use.  The default
implementation could use expat, but I also think a pure-Ruby version
should be created.  That will be more portable and might be useful for
creating a "mini-Ruby" distribution, since it will be considerably
smaller than the expat library.  But I do agree that it would be nice to
have a fast C XML parser like expat distributed with Ruby.

Ryan Leavengood