Hello, JT Paasch has written up a blog story titled "New Thoth engine" that outlines what looks, sounds, and works like a XAML parser for Flash.
JT Paasch writes: A while back I mentioned something about…what did I call it?…’eXtensible Thoth’ I think (I’ll call it ‘xThoth’). Anyways, the idea was to create a simple xml parser which would step through an xml fragment recursively and invoke a class for each tag it encounters. This is convenient because then you simply have to write a class for any tag you want to use, and you can thereby create xml-dialect libraries. For example, I might want to use a tag called <window>. To do that with this xThoth parser, you would simply need to write a class called ‘window’, and the xThoth parser would invoke that class whenever it encounters a <window> tag. You can make the class do whatever you like, but presumably the class would render a window in your movie according to specified attributes. So basically, the xThoth parser would no longer be limited to the Thoth dialect. Anybody could create any dialect they wanted simply by creating a library of classes for any tags in the relevant dialect. So I started writing the parser, but I ran into a number of problems which took some thinking to figure out how to best handle these problems. The basic issue is that the xThoth parser would need some API so any classes you write can tell the xThoth parser to do certain things. The two main needs were (1) be able to provide an API to stop the parser and to start the parser where it left off. For example, a <stylesheet> tag may need to load and parse some css document, and you may want the xThoth parser to stop and wait until that loading is complete before proceeding. So your ’stylesheet’ class which handles the <stylesheet> tag will need to tell the xThoth parser to stop parsing, and then when the stylesheet has loaded and been parsed, the ’stylesheet’ class would need to tell the xThoth parser to start parsing again where it left off. (2) be able to provide some way to handle multiple dialects. That means it needs to handle different namespaces and know how to associate particular namespaces with particular class libraries. I’m not particularly happy with how I did it, but both (1) and (2) are now in the xThoth engine. The first problem was solved simply by creating another method which references the main parsing method. The stopParsing () method simply sets this other method to null, and the stopParsing () method simply restores the reference to the main parsing method. This works okay, but I’m not sure if I like it. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out some other way to accomplish the starting/stopping capability. The second problem was solved by providing a special ‘dialect-library:namespacePrefix’ attribute to the main <thoth> tag. Basically, this attribute pairs up a namespace prefix with a class library. So you list the namespace and its prefix with the traditional ‘xmlns:namespacePrefix’ attribute, and then you specify the name of the class library with the ‘dialect-library:namespacePrefix’ attribute. That way you can use as many dialects as you like in a single document, and the xThoth parser will know which class libraries to invoke for which tag. Again, I’m not sure I like this solution, but it’s the most intuitive thing I can come up with up at the moment. All that is to say that the xThoth parser seems to be more or less complete now. The next step is to try and build some dialects. The first dialect I might try to create is the ‘Thoth’ library. I might try and make it even more like SVG this time around, but then again, I may not. We’ll see. I’ll probably also try to create a simple XUL dialect to show how the xThoth parser can be used for client side XUL. Anyways, if anybody wants a look at the xThoth parser code, let me know and I’ll email it to you. Of course, I’ll release it on absconditus.com when I’ve used it a bunch and know it (more or less) works. Source: http://www.absconditus.com/blog/index.php?p=8 Has anyone tried out Thoth? Does anyone know any other XAML-like alternatives for Flash? - Gerald PS: You can find out more about Thoth @ http://absconditus.com/thoth/guide0.69.html ------------------- Gerald Bauer XUL Alliance | http://xul.sourceforge.net United XAML | http://xaml.sourceforge.net Interested in hiring Gerald Bauer? Yes, I'm available. If you know of an opportunity in Toronto or Vancouver, please contact me today. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
