Hi all, I just attended a very interesting session at ApacheCon dealing with (binary) data format descriptions.
DFDL is a format able to describe the format of almost any data format. No matter if binary or non-binary. Apache Daffodil is able to read these DFDL files and generate parsers and serializers for these formats, but is a toolset based on Scala and hereby tightly bound to the Java VM. I don’t think Daffodil is currently an ideal option to implement the parsers, however I did like the idea of using DFDL to describe the data formats. With this we would have an XML base which we could read and convert to other formats. Maybe this could be ideal for generating parsers in multiple languages. The speaker mentioned that we could use Daffodil in the Unit-Tests to test the generated parsers and serializers, which does make sense. I wrote down a little brainstorming page here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/PLC4X/Supporting+other+Languages Please feel free to comment and discuss here … just wanted to take the idea back to you guys. Chris
