[izpack-devel] Adding XInclude support

[Tino Schwarze]

Hi Matthew,

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 03:47:59AM -0800, Matthew Fudge wrote:

> I'm looking at adding support for a subset of the XInclude specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/) to IzPack. 
> 
> To make a few projects of mine a bit more modular and maintainable I think it would be useful to allow parts of the 
> xml files used by IzPack to be included from other files (and yes I've tried using external entities but they are a bit limited
> for my needs)

Which parts do you want to include, in detail?

> The current code is based on a copy of the StdXMLBuilder class that has been modified to allow extending classes access to its internal state.
> 
> Note that this will not be a full implementation of the XInclude spec (I don't have time right now to handle the XPointer stuff properly)
> 
> So some questions: 
> 
> a) Is a change like this likely to be accepted?
> b) namespace support seems really limited in nanoxml when used in IzPack. I'm not seeing any. Am I missing something?

We use a rather old version of NanoXML (with some patches too). Because
we opted for small installer size and the new NanoXML is a lot larger
(in terms of JAR size which needs to be included in every installer), we
didn't want to switch.

So, yes, there's no namespace support and the parser is very
lightweight. Oh, BTW: We don't use SAX or JAXP because installers should
still run on 1.2? or 1.3 JREs.

> c) Is it preferable to make changes to the nanoxml packages or the izPack packages. I'm asking because it makes little difference to the
> code and many people prefer to keep third party source as original as possible.

I'd go for changing NanoXML. We're not going to upgrade anyway. And if
we do, it will be major changes.

Bye,

Tino.

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