Hi! I stumbled across DFDL / Apache Daffodil yesterday while looking for a way to specify file formats in a machine-readable form. I was surprised that there hasn’t been a lot more effort in this space, given the importance for archival, and I’m very keen to see the project succeed. I’ve not done much Open Source work before, but I’m a commercial software engineer/architect with over two decades’ experience, so hopefully I could be of some use.
I’m particularly interested in the handling of large binary files, which I see from the wiki and JIRA (e.g. DAFFODIL-1735) is a key area of concern for you guys as well, but I’m a little concerned that the DFDL 1.0 spec seems to have been written with some XML-like assumptions of how parsing should work, rather than how various binary formats are actually parsed (e.g. ZIP, with a signature at the start, then an index at the end, doesn’t seem to fit the document model). Are you looking for people to get involved with Daffodil? Is there anything I can help with to get started? Warm regards, — Russ
