Forum OpenACS Development: Upgrading ns_xml

I just skimmed it but my first impression is ... well, my first impression is that it's very nice to see a well-written design proposal, actually!  Looks good.

Currently OpenACS 4 makes very little use of ns_xml, in the core just to parse query files and to parse package .info files.  It's not used to generate .info files, nor is the XML doc tree retained after a .info file is parsed.

Obviously we're going to be making much heavier use of it in the future, especially in client packages.  So having someone pick this up, improve it and perhaps continue to maintain it for some time, at least ... yeah, it's great.

Well, I certainly like the idea of having the module supported. I have an extension to the bookmarks module using XML-RPC (to allow client prgs to retreive, update, and manipulate bookmarks) that I'm tweaking in my OpenACS 3.X system now. Once we're stable with 4.X, I'll be porting it over.

On another (though related) note, though...Dave, what's up with the NSSoap module? Holy smokes, that'd be cool. I see no files as SF yet...is there anything available? (I also have some potential patches to ns_xmlrpc I need to send your way, when I get organized...*grin*)

So, I guess I vote for any and all modules that support my XML-RPC stuff!

This might also be worth a look:

Using tDOM and tDOM XSLT
A high-performance Tcl-scripted XSLT engine
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tdom.html

tDOM is a high-performance, C-coded, DOM-oriented XML processor. tDOM XSLT is an XSLT engine built with tDOM that has extremely good performance in simple tests. tDOM and tDOM XSLT are open-source projects already in mission-critical production for several organizations. This article explains what you need to know to enjoy their advantages.

Simple benchmarks show that tDOM is one of the best-performing XML processors currently available. Access through the Tcl "scripting" language makes for a particularly potent development environment -- fast in both development and execution. A "dual level" (or two-language) model of development combines the advantages of Tcl and XSLT for different aspects of XML manipulation.

...

Engineer Zoran Vasiljevic builds tDOM into AOLserver for very high performance DOM-based HTML generation.

Just an update. I'm testing ns_xml 2.0 now, and will hopefully be able to release it as a beta in the next week or two.  As far as other options go, I haven't had the chance to play with them.  ns_xml was the closest thing to what I needed, was already embedded in the current version of OpenACS, and it was readily available.  ns_xml 2.0 provides all of the basic tree manipulation functionality that I imagine a web developer needing (with the possible exception of on-the-fly DTD validation and manipulation of XSL - at least as anything of more semantic significance than the XML that it, by definition, is).  Does anybody care to comment on the design?  It seems to me that if you want relatively fast XML with XSLT and relatively robust tree manipulation, and if, like me, you want (or in my case need) it nowish, this is worth a look.

Henry, today I received this in my email, (perhaps someone was awaiting your post?)

Project: TclSOAP  (tclsoap)
Package: tclsoap
Date   : 2002-02-27 01:20

Project "TclSOAP" ('tclsoap') has released the new version of package 'tclsoap'.
You can download it from SourceForge by following this link:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=25970&release_id=77119
or browse Release Notes and ChangeLog by visiting this link:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=77119 

That package supposedly supports SOAP for AOLserver and you'll have add your own OACS wrapper.