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The following shows the details of the configuration associated with :

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At the moment, Paul is blown away at the flexibility of using XML to encode configuration key/value pair information. He's only spent a few hours playing with XML, DTD, and XSL, but has enough understanding to be dangerous. At the moment he is considering whether this should be introduced into the build process for all developers, or if he should simply use it as his own productivity tool.

The following provides links to the original and resulting files. The beauty being that only a single XML file needs to be maintained - the rest are automatically generated. Paul had a tough time stopping his translations, there are lots of additional possibilities: Java code, Java properties files, HTML input form, rough GUI interfaces.

_config.xml

This is the original XML file. This is the only file which the developer needs to edit/maintain. NOTE: Your browser may attempt to interpret this file, so you may need to save it to disk and view it with a text file editor to see the actual contents (or use View Page Source if your browser gives you an error).

_config.html

This is the HTML output you are currently looking at which was automatically generated from the source XML file.

.cfg

This is the sample configuration file which was automatically generated from the source XML file.

_config.hh

This is the C++ class definition which was automatically generated from the source XML file.

_config.cc

This is the C++ class implementation which was automatically generated from the source XML file.

.man.html

This is the man page, whose description of the configuration file settings comes directly from the source XML file.

Config.html

This is the C++ API document which cxxwrap produces from the automatically generated header file.

You can see there is a lot of potential (I haven't even bothered with custom Java code to process the XML file yet - I've stuck with pure XSL).

There are however several things to consider prior to making this a tool for everyone:

• Would want a XML CVS area.
• Would require developer to have access to the xalan translater (this is OpenSource from apache.org.
• Would want a configure/make/make install script to allow developer to install it on a system.
• Would need some makefile updates to make it easier to include XML source into the build.
• Would want to review the DTD (Paul really just did it on the fly and it probably isn't really done in the proper manner - the fixed attributes to support XSL seem a bit sleazy).
• Would probably want a document describing how to create the source XML documentation.