Request for help

Martin Klang <[email protected]> Thu, 14 Oct 2004 04:44:48 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.o-xml
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello all,

I've got no less than three requests to make, so if you're looking for 
something to fill those long winter days/nights with look no further 
(for those of you having summer now: go surf!)

Firstly, a lot could be done to improve the inline documentation of the 
core types and the o:Lib library types. It would be particularly good 
to have more examples available for the library code.
Also the XSLT stylesheets used to generate the documentation could be 
refined.
The docs are generated from source files to DocBook format and then 
HTML, and come out looking like this:
http://www.o-xml.org/docs/lib/io/File.html
(A little) more information about o:XML inline documentation is 
available here: http://www.o-xml.org/projects/document.html

Secondly, both the compiler/interpreter and the library code of o:XML 
uses extensive unit tests to ensure bug-less builds and releases. 
However the tests aren't complete and a lot of the functionality needs 
further tests. If you could see yourself writing tests for either o:XML 
core types and functions, o:Path expressions or o:Lib then all help 
would be greatly appreciated!

If documentation and writing tests don't tickle your fancy there's a 
nice juicy bit of coding for someone to sink their teeth into ---
Neither of the SAX or DOM interfaces provide enough information to 
properly drive the o:XML compilation process. Instead of the current 
DOM-based solution I would like to implement a Xerces-based XNI 
compiler. XNI provides data about file encodings and source locations 
which DOM falls short on, and internal DTD which I don't think SAX 
does. If anyone is interested in lending a hand or leading the 
development of this component pls contact me. The work involves coding 
an XNI event handler that builds up a hierarchy of ObjectBox Template 
objects. More info on XNI (Xerces Native Interface) is here: 
http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/xni.html
Also do let me know if you know of other alternatives to DOM/SAX that 
might be suitable (must provide enough information about the source 
document to produce a /near/identical result, plus source file 
line/column info).
Another, smaller, Java-job is to write a SAX adaptor for the output - 
so far I've not seen any signs of demand for this though.

Also, of course, if anyone wants to contribute o:Lib library code, work 
on improving the compiler/interpretor, or help out in any other way let 
me know - all help is welcome and much appreciated!

/m