Wednesday 02 July 2003 Arabica

Received an email requesting permission to include Arabica on the cover disk of the forthcoming fifth edition of The XML Handbook by Goldfarb and Prescod. No doubt it will be even bigger and weightier than previous editions and just as bloody awful.

Despite my low regard for the book, I said yes. Not liking the book isn't reason enough to say no, and it seems to appeal to lots of other people. There's nothing to be gained by not being on the disk, either. On the other hand, there's probably not much to be gained because XML processing in C++ isn't that common, and there's so much else on there you'd have to be pretty dedicated to find it. Arabica's precursor SAXinC++ was included with the third (and presumably fourth) edition, and I'm not aware of anyone who used it as a result. Whatever, it's going in.

Three years ago, this was the spur for me to cut a new release, and I'm going to try and get one out for this. Here's what I hope to do, at least,
* combining libSAX, libArabicaUtils and libArabicaXML into a single lib
* making the std::wstring utility typedefs optional - on platforms with broken wide char support they're a positive hinderance
* finish the SAX and DOM writer samples so they support wide streams and output transcoding

Suggestions, patches, whatever, are welcome as always.

---

Tagged code, arabica, xml, and c++

---