StaxMate 1.0 released
After rather lengthy incubation period, I am happy to announce the first official release of StaxMate, "the perfect companion to your Stax processor". I hope that this release and the related setup of the new Codehaus home for the project will let more developers find the nifty library. As those who have read earlier entries on this blog know, I think StaxMate makes developing efficient streaming xml processing easy and much less painstaking than using "raw" Stax (or SAX) APIs.
For introduction on what StaxMate is and what it does, please refer to
StaxMate project home page. Also, I will try to write some more entries
on this blog. And finally, the
Uuid Web Service example (an earlier
"blog mini-series
" here at CowTownCoder), available from Subversion repository as well as from
home page, should show simple but realistic example of how to implement
basic "Plain Old Xml" style web services.
Beyond basics, here are some other miscellanous tidbits about StaxMate:
- Licensing is almost simples possible: BSD (new one, without advertising clause). Share and Enjoy.
- Version 1.x of StaxMate is compatible with version 2.0 of Stax2 extension API, implemented natively by Woodstox 3.x series, but can also be emulated for other Stax implementations.
- StaxMate is already in production use at least at one Fortune 500 company, for multiple web services.
- Outside the sphere of influence of its author, author knows so far of 2 other (groups of) users. But boy do I expect the adoption curve to "do the hockey stick"! :-)
As to future, here are basic plans for StaxMate future (in roughly this order):
- Rewrite current convoluted implementation of cursor synchronization, by making cursors aware of the nesting level they started at, and keeping track of current nesting level within context object.
- Verify that StaxMate works correctly on top of other Stax processors, such as Sun's SJSXP.
- Add "typed" functionality: read and write primitive datatype values, such as integers and floating point numbers, efficiently. This will probably be coordinated with adding of low-level support for this in Stax2 extension set, as implemented by Woodstox.
- Add support for XPath based navigation, for proper streaming subset of XPath. This would basically mean "traverse to the first matching node, in document order". XPath implementation could be based on Jaxen.
Finally, I would very much like to get feedback on anyone who uses, or even just plays with StaxMate. Drop me a line at "cowtowncoder at yahoo dot com", or leave a note here!
