From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@...>
Date: 2003-10-26T09:43:51+09:00
Subject: Suggestion for an XML and ZLIB library?

Greetings all,

Some of you might remember me.  I used to be in this list, but school has 
kept me out of the loop for several months.

I'm trying to re-subscribe, but the ctl address isn't working.  Until I 
get that sorted out, I'll have to ask you to put my email on the CC line.

I plan on starting a simple project, and I want to try to do it in Ruby.

Lately I have become interested in the OpenOffice.org project, and am 
fairly active in the users mailing list.  I have seen several requests for 
a program that can search for text inside OpenOffice.org files.

OOo SXW files are actually fairly simple conceptually.  They are a 
collection of XML files packed in a ZIP archive.  That's it.  I have 
already used Perl to write a couple of tiny programs to manipulate SXW 
files.

So, I guess that my project requirements are:
1) An XML library.
   After looking through RAA, I think I'll pick XMLSimple and REXML.

2) A ZIP librry.
   I need some help here.  I saw "ruby-zlib" in RAA, but I can't find
   any documentation.  Is it good?  All I need ZIP for is to extract
   one file from a ZIP archive.  That's it.

3) Portability (since OOo is cross-platform).

This is tricker, but this is also part of what made me think of Ruby.  OOo 
users are roughly speaking 60% Windows, 40% Linux (at least, on the 
list).  The Windows users are technicially competent, but not savvy.  I 
have no qualms asking them to download some dependencies, but most won't 
have a compiler.

Are there any suggestions on the best way to approach this?

-- 
Daniel Carrera    | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. | 
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".