From: "Sean O'Dell" <sean@...[REMOVE_THE_SPAM]>
Date: 2003-08-28T17:43:23+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] QuiXML 0.0.0

Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, 5:50:09 PM, Sean wrote [snipped]:
> 
> 
>>I've been a big fan of Sean Russell's REXML library for awhile now, but 
>>an internal project in which I embedded the Ruby interpreter required 
>>certain features in an XML library I couldn't quite get out of any one 
>>of the existing API's out there, so I wrote QuiXML.
> 
> 
> I'm curious, what features did you need that weren't already provided?
> 
> Gavin

Well, quite a few things I couldn't get in a single library.

One was marshaling (transmutation: not really marshaling); I was 
reading/writing a lot of XML, and I wanted some of it to come and go as 
Ruby objects.  I had code that was performing that task for me 
"as-needed" but it got to be a REAL pain after awhile, and I wanted to 
do something a little more out-of-the-way.

Another was native Ruby data types.  I wanted to be able to generate an 
XML data tree using only Hashes and Arrays, because the XML was going to 
and from some other code and I didn't want to stop and write abstraction 
layers.  A happy medium for me was generating trees using only Ruby data 
types, and then passing them off to QuiXML to be written, performing, of 
course, marshaling as it went.  Even though it's not a true abstraction 
layer for the other code, having it all as native Ruby containers means 
I can rip out QuiXML whenever I want; it's very easy to generate XML 
output from a set of native containers with a known structure.

Also, I just *like* creating my trees as native Ruby data types, rather 
than depending on the library itself to perform that task; it just feels 
more flexible that way.  I feel sort of "tied up" with the XML library 
with commands like "add_element."

Another thing was XPath; it works well most of the time, but sometimes I 
feel mired with it.  Since my QuiXML trees often contain real Ruby 
objects, rather than strings, it made more sense to produce an 
addressing scheme that made use of the "case-equality" method that many 
built-in objects have (String, Regex, Range, Date, etc.).  The way 
QuiXML's element path addressing works, you can find elements using 
regular expressions, numerical ranges or even look up specific dates or 
ranges.  I've just been a lot happier with it; it feels more "Ruby" to me.

Also, it had to be in C.  I eat through a lot of XML, and using C with 
the expat library just makes it blazingly fast.

Mmm... automatic encoding/decoding of special characters like <, >, ', " 
and & too.

Ah, and last but not least: I just feel a lot more productive in it.  =) 
  I released it because I thought perhaps like-minded folks might 
appreciate it.  =)

	Sean O'Dell