Hi Vincent
On 30.01.2008 12:10:58 Vincent Hennebert wrote:
> Hi Jeremias,
>
> As far as I understand the event-model.xml and test-event-model.xml
> files are automatically generated at build time. Is there any reason to
> put them under version control then?
Good catch. I guess I was confused by the necessity to place the
generated translation files under version control. But the model files
don't need to be there. I'll fix that.
> And this one is more to myself, to be sure I understand how things are
> working. At several places you do something like this:
> SAXTransformerFactory tFactory
> = (SAXTransformerFactory)SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance();
>
> But the SAXTransformerFactory class doesn’t re-define the newInstance
> method, which then is taken from TransformerFactory. AFAIU, to be sure
> it will create a SAXTransformerFactory instance you need to play with
> the "javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory" system property. Which IIC
> is not done anywhere, so it relies on the platform default, which
> obviously happens to actually create a SAXTransformerFactory. It’s ok,
> I’d just like to know if I am right in my assumptions?
Correct. There's no need to play with a system property for this to work.
The only requirement the above imposes on the system is that a TraX
implementation with support for the SAXTransformerFactory is available
(and after all we need a SAXTransformerFactory in most places because
FOP makes extensive use of the passive XML handling pattern, ex.
Fop.getDefaultHandler()). Most implementations always just return a
SAXTransformerFactory anyway.
However, there's one thing in this context that is still on my list and
that I want to change eventually: We have multiple places where we
create a new TransformerFactory. It's always the platform default that
is used. Some FOP users have asked before that there be a default that
is set to and applies to FOP only, i.e. we need a central
SAXTransformerFactory for FOP.
> Using a TransformerFactory just to serialize data into an XML file may
> sound a bit weird (this has nothing to do with XSLT). It appears that
> Xerces defines an XMLSerializer class dedicated to that. Basically the
> following:
> Result res = new StreamResult(outputFile);
> SAXTransformerFactory tFactory
> = (SAXTransformerFactory)SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance();
> TransformerHandler handler = tFactory.newTransformerHandler();
> Transformer transformer = handler.getTransformer();
> transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
> handler.setResult(res);
> handler.startDocument();
> object.toSAX(handler);
> handler.endDocument();
>
> would be replaced by the following:
> ContentHandler handler = new XMLSerializer(new FileWriter(outputFile),
> new OutputFormat("xml", "UTF-8", true));
> handler.startDocument();
> object.toSAX(handler);
> handler.endDocument();
>
> Since we have switched to Java 1.4 as a minimum requirement, the
> xercesImpl dependency is no longer required, but since we have it
> already, why not keeping it for that. WDYT?
It's a possibility but not one I like too much. I know about the
XMLSerializer but I didn't use it explicitely to avoid a hard dependency
on Xerces and because it's actually deprecated. See:
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/xerces/java/trunk/src/org/apache/xml/serialize/XMLSerializer.java?view=log
Xerces's serializer has been merged with the one from Xalan and Xerces
now ships that serializer in their latest releases. The new serializer
is this one (found in serializer-2.7.0.jar in our lib directory):
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/xalan/java/trunk/src/org/apache/xml/serializer/
(XML serialization is found in ToXMLStream, never used it myself)
The main reason why I prefer the Transformer pattern (and I really use
it everywhere) is an educational one. If you look at our embedding
examples [1] I've used this pattern everywhere. I believe it makes it
easier especially for beginners to work exclusively with the Transformer
pattern because it's very simple but still extremely flexible. I'm even
parsing XML that way if I don't need any special features that I would
only get with SAXParser or DocumentBuilder. Basically, you just use the
same pattern everywhere and you don't need to know the specifics of
SAXParser, DocumentBuilder, XMLSerializer or ToXMLStream and it works
with every decent JAXP implementation.
[1] http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.94/embedding.html
BTW, even Xalan suggests to use the Transformer pattern to serialize
XML:
http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/usagepatterns.html#serialize
Jeremias Maerki
