ANN: bridge 0.2.0

[Sylvain Hellegouarch]

Hi all,

I am pleased to announce the release of bridge 0.2.0, a general purpose
XML library for Python and IronPython (and ultimately Jython).

bridge is very simple and light. It basically let you load an XML
document via a set of different parsers (xml.dom, Amara, lxml,
System.Xml and ElementTree) and creates a tree of Elements and
Attributes before releasing the parser resources.

This means that once the document is loaded it is independent from the
underlying parser.

bridge then provides a straightforward interface to navigate through the
tree and manipulate it.

bridge does not try to replace underlying XML engines but offer a common
API so that your applications are less dependent of those engines.
bridge offers a couple of other goodies however to play with the tree of
elements (see the documentation).

== What's new? ==

This release is an important milestone for bridge:

 * it now supports ElementTree
 * it fixes major issues with namespace handling and should now work
correctly
 * it adds a set of unit tests
 * it adds support for Comment and ProcessingInstruction

== TODO ==

Potentially the IronPython implementation is not as up-to-date as the
other parsers. This will be quickly fixed.

All parsers will generate the same bridge structure. The only minor
difference at the present time is coming from the lxml parser which does
not preserve processing instructions and comments before the root
element. bridge cannot therefore access them. Mind you ElementTree does
not preserve either but I was able to workaround this behavior.

Add more unit tests.

== Download ==

 * easy_install -U bridge
 * Tarballs http://www.defuze.org/oss/bridge/
 * svn co https://svn.defuze.org/oss/bridge/

== Documentation ==

Wiki: http://trac.defuze.org/wiki/bridge (not yet updated for 0.2.0)

API: http://www.defuze.org/oss/bridge/doc/html/
To see the implementation of the parsers you'll need to look at the
private API.


Have fun,
-- Sylvain Hellegouarch
http://www.defuze.org