[Gnome-devtools] glf - preview

[Mark <jamess1 wwnet com>]

Hello,
  I've decided to preview the work I've done so far for the language
analysis framework (from now on I will refer to it as glf). I fear that
if I leave this on my hard disk long enough it will stay there for good.
You can download the interface specifications at the following URL:

http://www.oakland.edu/~maslicke/glf.tar.gz

Basically they are a modification of the DOM interfaces. The reason for
modifying the DOM interfaces and not using them directly, is because
they contain various amounts SGML/XML/HTML specific data and
interfaces. I think the design of DOM is very good in other respects,
therefore I think it makes a good base. Also by not strictly using DOM
we
have free reign to change what we like, and do imagine the interface
changing a good deal.

By structuring glf like DOM the original design of Harmonia changes
slightly. Now the language modules are the objects that contain the data
of a document. The nice thing about this is, each Document type can
define it's own Node types, and these are exposed directly through the
COBRA interfaces. The transformation from language specification to
language module does not change that much, the main difference is that
instead of outputting a dynamic library, the compiler will output a IDL
specification and implementation. Another change is that the interface
that the applications use is now specified by the base document and the
derived documents, before the interface was with the language kernel.
The language kernel will contain all the shared code that is used in
the language analysis, an all the language module implementations will
link
to the language kernel.

One thing that is incomplete is the versioning interface, I still need
to work on this a bit.

Let me know what you think. I think it would be a good idea to put this
in a CVS pretty soon.

Mark