[XML-SIG] Xalan and Xerces...

[Rich Salz]

> Also given that C++ and Java versions of Xalan and Xerces are available,
> this would have to me at least seemed a perfect fit for Python and JPython
> both.

I don't know that I'd call them two different versions, but rather I'd
say that the Apache group has two different implementations.  The API's
look kinda similar, but they're not really that alike, even though they
keep saying things like "port the Java serializer classes." :)

And if there are two, why can't there be a third?  It's WAAY too early
to declare victory for one side or the other.

The Xalan/Xerces folks have to spend a fair amount of time dealing with
lots of issues like delete vs delete[], garbage collection (er, sorry,
lazy evaluations when you call Terminate() :), wchar_t/XmlChar, threads
and other platform issues that are really secondary.  Because of that, I
believe that PyXML and friends will soon catch up and surpass the Apache
C++ XML efforts.

> Why has fourthought's offering been chosen over Xalan and Xerces? [again
> genuine question, not rhetorical]

I don't think that this has happened.  Feel free to write extension code
that wraps the C++ stuff into Python classes.  (I'd recommend swig,
www.swig.org). You can probably get xml.xalan and xml.xerces as the
package names without any problem.

> In an ideal world a Python DOM/XPath/XSLT wrapper that could mask either a
> Xalan/Xerces or MSXML core, with an automatic switch dependant upon platform

Last I looked the API's weren't all that similar -- different enough
that some of those wrappers would be pretty hairy.

> I would like to have developers think of Python and XML in the same way as
> they think of Perl and regular expressions.
 
Many of us already are.
	/r$