[XML-SIG] Breeze toolkit replacement

[Austin Bingham]

Hi everyone. I am new to this list, but I have been mucking with PyXML for
the past week or so. Great work :)

I wanted to gauge interest in an XML related project I've been considering
for some time. www.breezefactor.com produces a product called called
(surprise) Breeze Studio which has proven to be a very powerful tool where I
work. Basically, it provides a GUI which lets you design what is effectively
a DTD. Based on this layout, Breeze produces Java classes which parse/write
XML files and produce a a set of objects containing the XML data. These
objects provide extremely simple, reliable access to XML files. While this
sounds perilously close to DOM, the presentation, simplicity, and usability
of this tool are astounding; Breeze seems to simply repackage the work done
by DOM (or SAX...who knows). Of course, there are problems. Breeze is
pricey, at best, and prohibitively expensive at worst (esp. if you are an
academic organization like us). Also, Breeze currently only produces Java
classes. The potential for a tool like this provide interoperable classes in
many different languages is so obvious that I am amazed that they don't seem
to consider it.

So, I have been considering writing a free analogue to Breeze. Python seems
like an ideal language to do this work in, and the wonderful XML support you
guys provide makes it that much easier. I could certainly use some help on
this. If there's no real interest, that's cool...sorry for taking up some of
your bandwidth. If there is, I'd love to discuss the possibilities with
anyone who might want to help or is just interested in the project. Thanks,
and keep up the good work!

Austin Bingham
Laboratory for Intelligent Processes and Systems
University of Texas at Austin
abingham@lips.utexas.edu