[gdome] some thoughts....

[lacage email enst fr (Mathieu Lacage)]

hi all,

raph has had a few ideas/thoughts about gdome's future:

1) He agreed to drop the autogeneration of gdome-xml.c
/me feels relieved !!!

2) raph proposed :
	2.1 to drop the backend/frontend separation idea.
	2.2 to drop gnome-xml's DOM API and use the SAX API.

I don't like both of these ideas and here are the reasons:

2.1
----
pros: 
	- we will never write the CORBA backend which was envisioned
	for gdome. This means that the separation is not really
	necessary anymore.

cons:
	- droping this would mean getting rid of the ifgen.pl file
	(all of the autogeneration) adn renaming all the functions 
	in gdome-xml.c from gdome_xml_* to gdome_*
	- there is another problem with this. Doing so would mean
	droping the vtables we use and it would mean writing code
	like:
	if (self == GDOME_ATTR) {
	/* code */
	} else if (self == GDOME_NODE) {
	/* code */
	} else if ....
	This is the most awfull code I can think of.

Conclusion: I am DEFINITELY agains this idea and raph seems to agree.


2.2
----
This one is much more controversial. The main reason why I don't like it
is that it would involve a lot of rework in gdome and neither raph nor I
have time for this. The second reason is that while I don't see any serious
disadvantage, I don't see any serious advantage to it either.

pros:
	- we will be independant of the XML parser used.
	Using the SAX API means we will not call directly any of the gdome-xml
	API function.
	The question is whether this is cool or not. I don't think this is sooo
	cool we would want to do it.
	- we will gain some cleaness in our code.
	The main advantage (which is why raph proposes this) is that if we do so,
	we won't have to deal with gnome-xml's structures and we will be able
	to use our own structures instead of having wrappers around
	the gnome-xml ones. 
	The question here is again whether this is cool or not. I don't see any
	advantage of this. raph: could you point me to a concrete exemple of why
	this is sooo cool ?

cons:
	most of the cons are summed-up there:
	http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html
	My point is that if we do this, a _lot_ of work will need to be done:
	- we will need to write the XML parser for reading XML documents.
	- we will need to write a saving routine which reads our DOM tree 
	and saves with gnome-xml.

Mathieu