Projects

libxmlmm

While developing applications with gtkmm I was introduced to the libxml++, which is a fine wrapper of the XML library libxml2. I was so fond of the library that I wanted to use it with other projects; especially ones that build on top of SDL and openGL. Unfortunately libxml++ uses Glib::ustring to handle the UTF-8 strings with libxml2. Although the basic premise is reasonable, ensure that any string operations work with UTF-8, the resulting link and deployment dependencies do not. On top of the regular dependency to libxml2 and iconv, you also depend on glibmm, which in turn depends on glib, gobject and a few minor libraries commonly found on Linux systems.

If you need the libraries all is nice and fine, but if you need half a dozen libraries, just for passing around UTF-8 strings, it is overkill. Especially, as it turns out, most if not all operations I needed was storing and passing the string around. I can’t think of one case where I needed to do a string operation on a value taken from the XML document.

After finding no solution that the maintainers of libxml++ where comfortable with, I decided to roll my own library, thus libxmlmm was born. Since libxmlmm and libxml++ wrap the same C library, they have a few things in common, but libxml++ does a few things differently. The basic DOM is mostly similar, but the accessors are refined. For example most of your operations involve elements, so most accessors have a version that handles elements; this makes the client code much cleaner, since you don’t need to cast nodes to elements, where you know only a element can come out. The other big thing is that XQuery queries can be used to set or get any value, not only nodes. This enables to formulate queries that do not reference nodes, such as functions like “count(books)”.

rioki@github

I am mainly using github for my hobby programming. Not each project there is worthwhile to mention, but you can all find them there.