Hi,
I have just went and look at some of the other build tools emerging and they
all share one common characteristeric. They all have a richer property access
expressions. What do I mean? Consider the following case;
class MyDataStructure
{
Vector items = new Vector();
}
MyDataStructure mds = new MyDataStructure();
mds.items.add( "item1" );
mds.items.add( "item2" );
mds.items.add( "item3" );
getContext().setProperty( "mds", mds );
The above creates a complex object and places in property store. However under
the current model there is no way to access the "insides" of the mds property
- at least not without writing another task. I was thinking that it may be a
nice idea to add a simple path expression library on top of our property
evaluation system so that you could do something like
<echo message="The following should evaluate to the string 'item'"/>
<echo message="${mds/items['item1']}"/>
We could create our own expression language or clone it from an existing
project (maybe velocity). However I believe there is an XPath library at
Apache that is meant to be damn fine (Jaxen in commons IIRC) that we could
use (Not sure I personally haven't looked at it but it is meant to be all
good).
Anyways I haven't actually prototyped this but I thought it would be neat to
do. Anyone who wants to have a play should feel free to do so ;)
--
Cheers,
Peter Donald
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