GSoC Update: Week 9: GXml

Hello list!

This week has proven interminably long. Work has surrounded two main tasks

libgdata port: I'm porting libgdata as a test. The patch is almost complete, but not quite. It replaces almost all the libxml2 usage and compiles. It's volatility means that I'm linking a diff patch rather than pushing it to a repo, as up until Thursday, I was still figuring out how to handle specific cases, or changing my mind on how I was already handling them.

memory: I don't have a great understanding of how to handle memory for APIs that were generated through Vala, and I need to review that. I've learned a lot, but some of the Vala documentation is kind of out-dated, like that on transferring ownership. Perhaps when GSoC is done I can use what I've learned and update the documentation :D
namespace support: It isn't part of DOM Level 1 Core that we're implementing, but libgdata uses namespaces, so right now those sections are commented out or ignored. I will try to implement something in this next week.
verbosity: While some things are smaller/more concise using GXml, other stuff is more verbose, because libxml2 already has a compact naming "convention". After writing "gxml_dom_..." a hundred times, I'm considering removing the "_dom_" namespace section, so GXml.Element.get_attribute () will be gxml_element_get_attribute () rather than gxml_dom_element_get_attribute (). The Dom namespace is there to help separate future work from SAX and XPath, but enough of its classes will be used in other namespaces to justify omitting Dom to me.
porting guide: I have a text file that outlines common mappings for things, like "how to get a property in GXml" and compares against libxml2. I'm going to move it onto live.gnome.org when I have time to format it.

documentation: with a little bit of help, and a new conceptual understanding of what valadoc's options do, I can now generate documentation. Each class and method has something written about it now, though some of it is vague, some is inaccurate (!), and some of it could do with examples. I'll note that I'm annoyed that it complains when I use a double-space after a period.
sed: it is my friend. After hand-porting lots of code for libgdata, I eventually got comfortable enough with the process to start automating it by creating a bunch of sed rules. That sped things up greatly this past week, though it still left me to manually review and fix the things it missed, which sometimes took extra time because it became hard to see what was originally intended. Hehe.
Desktop Summit:

Hooray!

While I'm only a GSoC student, living in Canada, I wouldn't have been able to afford this myself, so I am incredibly grateful to the GNOME Foundation, since I am

I'll actually be in Germany for about 3 weeks, as my parents are both from Germany and I have many relatives there, and have never been before.

Cheerio!
Richard