Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

Resurrecting libxml-ruby

This is great news:

After iterating through a couple of releases over the last two weeks, the Ruby libxml community is happy to announce the availability of version 0.8.0, which we believe is ready for prime time. It offers a great combination of speed, functionality and conformance (libxml passes all 1800+ tests in the OASIS XML Tests Suite).

libxml is great for XML processing; very fast, correct and stable. Having working Ruby bindings for it is superb. Interesting comment from Charles Oliver Nutter:

Since so many people seem to be interested in a good XML library these days, and since XML libraries by and large look pretty much the same on the surface, I’m pretty sure we could map the libxml APIs onto JAXP for JRuby. That would allow people even more confidence to move to libxml for all XML purposes, since they wouldn’t be tied to the C impls.

Excellent idea.