GXml 0.0.1 and Interruptions

GXml (formerly GDom) development was sidetracked for almost two weeks due to personal matters that required my attention and energy, but after discussions with my mentor, things are progressing again.



Since the last blog update, a lot has happened, some of which was reported on gnome-soc-list, and some of which in the last week.

• GXml: We decided to rebrand our effort as GXml, though we're still just implementing the DOM Level 1 Core API.  In the future, GObject SAX and XPath may be provided.


• I/O: We can read files from GInputStreams (given a patch for libxml2's bindings).  We can also save documents to paths, but not yet GOutputStreams, which will require more enhancements to the libxml2 Vala bindings.  (Patches to come.)


• website: https://live.gnome.org/XML was updated, but is now out of date again.  I will update it again this weekend including scheduling information for the rest of the summer.


• bugzilla: we have a 'gxml' bugzilla product now, which I've started to use to manage features to come.  I still need to enter more.


• building: we now use WAF as our build system.  This proved trickier than I expected, but I like how clean the result is.  


• extended coverage: more classes work more fully now, including CharacterData, Text, NodeList, and a few others, and come with fun tests.  Some classes in the API do not seem to have counterparts to wrap in libxml2 (like ProcessingInstruction and EntityReference) and we might have to forego supporting them.  


• first release: while the source code has been available in a gitorious repo since the beginning, I have wrapped up a tarball and uploaded it to my server for today: http://kosmokaryote.org/files/gxml/gxml-0.0.1.tar.bz2.  I've done this entirely so we can migrate to git.gnome.org, which wants at least one release for a new project.  I don't really recommend using it until libxml2 binding patches are available, though, so GIO can be used rather than file system paths.


• project port: my request for volunteer projects from yesterday got a good response and I'm going to look at them this weekend and then decide by Monday which I'd like to use.  Thank you for your helpful responses!


• libxml2 bindings: I'll need to submit patches for the libxml2 bindings so GXml can implement some of the features we want.  For example, I've been intent on using xmlSaveToIO to get an xmlSaveCtxtPtr, since it aligns well with GOutputStream's methods, but those two libxml2 items aren't bound yet.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.



Update:

I linked the wrong tarball.  It's the same contents, but the tarball should be gxml, not gdom, and be generated by distcheck, not by hand.  The link has been updated.