GSoC Update: Week 7: GXml

[Richard Schwarting <aquarichy gmail com>]

Hello again.

GXml (formerly GDom) development was sidetracked for almost two weeks due to personal matters that required my attention and energy, so I'm missing a week 6 e-mail report, but after discussions with my mentor, things are progressing again.

• I/O: Reading got more testing, and writing was implemented.  Attempts to use GIO for all of this hit snags with libxml2's Vala bindings, though.  Patches to those will be forthcoming. 
  
• building: we now use WAF as our build system.  This proved trickier than I expected, but I like how clean the result is.  The old handmade make files have been removed finally.
  
• extended coverage: more classes work more fully now, including CharacterData, Text, NodeList, and a few others, and come with fun tests.  Some classes in the API do not seem to have counterparts to wrap in libxml2 (like ProcessingInstruction and EntityReference) and we might have to forego supporting them.  
• first release: while the source code has been available in a gitorious repo since the beginning, I have wrapped up a tarball and uploaded it to my server for today: http://kosmokaryote.org/files/gdom-0.0.1.tar.gz.  I've done this entirely so we can migrate to git.gnome.org, which wants at least one release for a new project.  I don't really recommend using it until libxml2 binding patches are available, though, so GIO can be used rather than file system paths.
• project port: my blogged request for volunteer projects from yesterday got a good response and I'm going to look at them this weekend and then decide by Monday which I'd like to use.
  
• libxml2 bindings: I'll need to submit patches for the libxml2 bindings so GXml can implement some of the features we want.  For example, I've been intent on using xmlSaveToIO to get an xmlSaveCtxtPtr, since it aligns well with GOutputStream's methods, but those two libxml2 items aren't bound yet. 

Previously I was writing a separate e-mail and a separate blog post, since the two audiences seem slightly different.  However, that often meant they wouldn't go out at the same time, and I have a case where two weeks ago an e-mail went out without a corresponding blog post.  I'm now going to just write the blog post first and lightly modify it for the list.  Let me know if you have any objections.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.
    Richard Schwarting