Re: Sun XML early access

Michael Kay (M.H.Kay@eng.icl.co.uk)
Mon, 28 Sep 1998 11:32:17 +0100


>> They've done some interesting
>> things with the DOM, for example the ability to nominate
>> user-defined subclasses of Element, and a TreeWalker
>> interface. This is where SAXON started last December!
>
>Hmmm ... did I ask you to elaborate on this one? SAXON
>started there, and that's not what it's got now; it's
>effectively got a dispatch framework rather than an
>in-memory data structure. Was that because you didn't
>want the in-memory stuff?

Yes, it's an interesting history. I started off by building
the document tree with MSXML, and wrote a TreeWalker class
to make it easier to process the tree serially (unlike SUN's
TreeWalker which supports a getNext() interface, mine did a
callback at each node); then I realised most of my
applications were single-pass, so I changed it to do
essentially the same thing on top of an event-based
interface like SAX. Later other people asked for a
non-serial interface, so I put the ability to walk the DOM
back in.

(I've now got it working to be independent of the DOM
implementation, with drivers for SUN and Docuverse: not yet
released though).

Mike K