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August 10, 2005
Electric XML Lives On
I have been playing with Ruby some lately and today looked at how XML is supported in the language. Interestingly the XML package in Ruby is named REXML, which apparently stands for Ruby Electric XML. Imitation is certainly a form of flattery and although I never wrote much code for EXML while at The Mind Electric, I was happy to see it living on in Ruby. For those of you who may not know, Electric XML was (is?) an XML parser written in Java that was both fast and very easy to use. Although it was not an standard open-source project the source code was shipped with the product way back when. It ceased being a stand-alone library after TME was acquired by webMethods and I am not sure if the source still ships with Glue (if it does there should be a build file that will build EXML.jar for your programming pleasure).
One interesting bit of irony on this topic; from what I have read Ruby seems to shun XML (Rails uses YAML for config I believe) as much as possible so REXML may not get the workout that it did in Java; nonetheless, if you do have to use XML (which you invariably do at some point) it is nice to know that a clean API is ready for consumption.
Posted by harris at August 10, 2005 11:20 PM
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Comments
Yes, the some segments of the Ruby community have an almost pathological aversion to XML, preferring the use of significant indentation as markup delimiters. (One has to wonder about overlap with that segment of the Ruby community that slags Python for exactly that "feature.")
But there are Ruby XML users, and there is a Ruby XML site: http://www.rubyxml.com (administered by yours truly).
There are assorted XML/REXML resources there, including some articles I've written on REXML.
Posted by: James at August 14, 2005 11:01 PM