XPath API issues and plans

[Lionel Villard]

Hi all,
       I want to give you an overall of the remaining issues that need to
be addressed to fulfill the XPath API requirements (in xstl20 branch under
the xpath_rwapi directory). One of these requirements is to allow several
applications to implement and/or reuse efficiently the XPath API and many
problems need to be solved in order to reach it. Here the list of these
issues and also more general tasks to be done:

XPath public API:

- namespace/qname resolver : most of applications use a qname manager for
example to share the same qname pool throughout their application.
Currently the public XPath API relies on the JAXP QName definition. I want
to remove this dependency and to define a QName interface that
applications can implement within their QName manager.
- The same mecanism should be provided for the data model (sequence type
and item type).

XPath API implementation:

- Semantic analysis: currently no semantic analysis is performed.
Therefore the _expression_ a/(43+23)/f is correctly parsed but an error
should be raised.
- An "optimization mode" should be provided. In this mode, only obvious
optimizations should be done, for example constant folding.

Parser:

- function call: right now, 'function call' AST nodes are created without
knowing the name of the function, which prevent fine-grain specialisation
at construction time. The same problem occurs with sequence types. I just
need to figure out how to do it in javacc.

- updates the XPath grammar. Not an issue, just a lot of work.

That's it for now. Comments are greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Lionel Villard
IBM T.J Watson Research

Lionel Villard
IBM T.J Watson