Hello World, I am writing an XMPP (Jabber) server in Ruby. XMPP uses XML for its protocol. This means I have to do a good deal of XML parsing, in Ruby.
Right now I am using REXML to parse the individual stanzas as they come in. However, in order to do this without REXML complaining of "multiple root elements" (that is, XMPP is streaming XML over a TCP socket, so I only get the root element once) I have to wrap every incoming chunk of XMPP with my own <root/> tag, and then ignore that after REXML parses it. I am currently unhappy with this approach. Another option is to use REXML's stream parsing. I don't really like this idea. It seems the only benefit of using SAX(ish) parsing is when you're dealing with huge documents that you don't want to load into memory. This isn't the case. I get maybe 5-10 objects per parse. Most of the people I've talked to in XMPP insist on using SAX (or something like it, such as REXML's stream parsing). The other reason I don't like REXML's stream parsing (or libxml's SAX) is because I have to provide a class instance for it to use for the event-parsing, and this class has to be a giant state machine, which seems wrong to me. I don't want to have to write a complicated class to, in effect, parse the XML myself when the XML parser should be doing this for me. The other options include using hpricot to do the incoming parsing (since it's C, and way faster than REXML) and continue to use REXML for generating the outgoing XML (I can't seem to figure out how to do this in hpricot, if it's even possible). Although, XMPP requires XML well-formedness, and hpricot does not do validation (to the best of my knowledge). I also like xml-simple, but it uses REXML underneath it all, so I'm left with the same issues. My real question is, is there a GOOD REASON to switch for the scheme I currently use? A number of people seem to think it's the "Wrong Thing" to do, but I'm not quite sure what the "Right Thing" is. I don't think it's SAX. Thanks for any feedback. -- rakaur _______________________________________________ JDev mailing list FAQ: http://www.jabber.org/discussion-lists/jdev-faq Forum: http://www.jabberforum.org/forumdisplay.php?f=20 Info: http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________
