Addons support for handling XML data seems to be a little thinner in
J804 than it was for j602. In fact on a cursory glance through Package
Manager I can't find any. I'd rather not write my own if someone has
already done it.

This is potentially a very wide-ranging request, so let me focus a bit.

Apple is heavily into XML for every purpose involving storage and
inter-application communication of structured data. Conversion tools
abound. Just about every Objective-C library object of any complexity
can i/o its stored data as XML (…to a file, maybe piped, or straight
to another object). This isn't used just for OS X but also virtually
unchanged for iOS, iWatch and iTV --which are the growth areas for
saleable apps.

I'm playing with top-ends written in Objective-C to communicate with a
J daemon (hacking JHS for the purpose) and the easiest way to get back
complex data from an Apple app window view into J is in the form of
XML, in one of the standardized Apple formats. Particularly the
ubiquitous plist format.

It would be nice to find that someone has written verbs to convert a
plist into a 2-column nested noun of keys and corresponding strings,
and vice-versa. Or that someone has written an XML parser using DTD
(Document Type Declaration), which would be needed to handle
tree-based data, data from grids, svg, etc.

I'd hazard a guess that suitable verbs lie buried in the guts of JHS
for the purpose of parsing HTML, but I know too little about JHS
internals to recognize them. I get the idea JHS is geared to sending
HTML and getting back AJAX. Not sending/receiving XML. I'd love to be
proved wrong.

Ian
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Reply via email to