Ever since I got my copy of Perl & XML I've been fiddling around with XML no end.
The fruits of all of this are two more new modules. The first of these is the pretty much completed one XML::SAX::Convenience which is a simple Exporter module that provides quick and dirty routines for quickly spitting out SAX2 events for starting, filling in, and ending XML.
What do people think of this? Is it too simple? Is there something better that does this kind of thing already? Should I upload it to CPAN (er, after I've spell checked the documentation anyway?)
The second one is - of course - a testing module. This is tentatively called Test::XML::SAX and is designed to test that a handler pipeline is spitting out the expected events. This hasn't got past the documentation stage - I need to actually write the tests and the code - but please, first, some feedback.
You know, I should probably join a Perl related XML mailing list somewhere, but yeesh - more mailing lists, scary...
The best place is probably the activestate one:
http://listserv.activestate.com/mailman/listinfo/perl-xml
It's got most of the XML module authors on it and it's not too high volume (10-15 messages per day when busy).
-Dom
Your SAX helper is definitely useful, no doubt. In fact, that has been in plan for ages (I think you could find the details in the archives. Look for NodeFactory if you want, but it's mostly historical). The main reason it never saw the light of day is that we wanted it to be coordinated with the PerlDOM efforts, but that lost steam in the process. So yes, please do release it (and announce it).
The only flaw I can see with it is that it doesn't look very namespace friendly. You can set a namespace mapping but that wouldn't be enough for a number of uses and doesn't seem to work for namespaced attributes (unless I misunderstood it, which is very much possible). I'm sure however that there are nice solutions for that.
As for the test modules, it's also something that's needed. You might want to look at Devel::TraceSAX to see if it couldn't cooperate with it (that way one could test any part of a pipeline).
Thanks for joining the crew, we definitely need new hands as there's always cool stuff to do
I have to second Dom in inviting you to join the perl-xml list. It's a really low traffic list, the level isn't always high but if you ask a question with any degree of complexity you're almost sure to get a good answer. You might want to drop by #axkit-dahut on rhizo as it's the informal place to discuss Perl and XML stuff (and Dahuts).
