how to ingrate xml support in lire

[Egon Willighagen]

Op donderdag 15 maart 2001 20:47, schreef Joost van Baal:
> LOGFILE -> service2dlf -> DLF FILE ->
>          various small report scripts -> RAW REPORT
>
> RAW REPORT -> querycalc-tidy -> FORMATTED ASCII REPORT
>
> I believe it would be wisest to get rid of the raw report format.
> This might better be replaced by an xml file, since this gives
> us the possibility to support richer data structures.  We'll gain
> flexibility by doing this. 

I agree. But by choosing XML as format, you also choose the tools.
And this *will* raise the footprint. 

Unless...

We find good means of identifying the XML tools already available on the 
system when Lire is installed. It requires GCC to be installed, why not 
require XML tools as well....

A second option is that though we use XML as in internal format, the user
is *not* required XML tools, and a small script is used to convert the XML 
report into a ASCII report (this script will be written).

However, more complex functionality we want to add later, like merging new 
reports to older report to get a picture of the information flow in time, are 
getting increasingly more diffecult if no XML tools are used...

Thus, the in between solution is, if the user wants a small footprint, it can
do limited things. If he (or she) needs to do more interesting things,
time-dependant report, clustering of data, he will need XML tools.

(my opinion :)

> If we choose to do this, all small report scripts (
>   report_*
> ) need to be changed. They should generate small xml files,
> instead of the current raw report snippets.

I propose to start do this, just after this months release (this weekend?)

> I don't think we should enforce the use of big xml parsers. 

XML parsers or often not large... as small as 34 kB... (Java's Aelfred).
Xalan and Xerces are strange exceptions... but offer much more than
just XSLT processing and XML parsing respectively...

> If people desire to stick with the simple ascii reports, they should be
> able to do so, without using big xml parsers. 

This is the solution above... (which Joost and I discussed yesterday)...

> I don't think a solaris sysadmin would like to install lire, if she 
> needed to install xalan or something similar next to it, in order to be
> able to use it.

1) As said above, we might detect XML tools available
2) XML support will grow... so the change of finding tools as well
3) Lire might install Xerces/Xalan-C itself, if no tools available
4) Or... just ascii reports. 

> We could write a parser for our own small xml files, which does
> _just_ enough to generate an ascii report. (I have no clue about how
> difficult this is.) 

Me neither. I think i have it up and running within a week, but it will
not be flexible... and a fear breaks now and then... but that's all internal 
stuff we/I know about...

> A less nice solution would be to keep the
> current raw reports, and convert these to xml (I believe we have
> something like this in place now.)

Not just 'less nice', but if we do this we would loose the advantage of XML
properties...

> When we choose to do this, we
> could keep our current querycalc-tidy.  However, the system will
> not gain in flexibility this way.

Indeed :)

> Is my story clear?  Any comments?

Hereby...

Egon

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