[MUD-Dev] free XML Parser (was Re: clients anyone?...)

[James Wilson]

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Adam J. Thornton wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 14, 1998 at 03:51:59AM +0100, Andrew Wilson wrote:

>> XML is meant to be lightweight, so it probably won't cause too much
>> of a noticable performance hit clientside, unless your client is
>> especially graphics hungry.  I'm not sure how much of the client
>> machine's processing capacity is used up by something as intensive
>> as UO's client.  My guess is that it's "as much as possible".
>
>I'll look into XML, then.  If there are freely-distributable reasonably
>lightweight parsers ready to link into one's own code, it might be a
>reasonable solution.

I didn't see a response mentioning expat, James Clark's free xml parser. 
It's the xml parser which will be used in the next release of Netscape,
and which will form the basis for Perl's upcoming xml support. See 
<url: http://www.jclark.com>. God bless James Clark. I use expat at work 
and man it's fast. It's in ansi c so shouldn't be a problem to integrate into
whatever architecture you've got.

[snip]

>I envision most player commands being put in a tokenized form before
being
For
>
>Player Client: <<Move towards (5,5) with speed 3.2>> or 
>               <<Get Hammer>> or
>               <<Give Banknote to Bubba>>,
>where the verbs will be replaced with some canonical form, and object id's
>will likewise be obj_id_t's, which currently are just good old 32-bit
>integers.  I think it will be easy to fit all of the common
>non-conversation situations into a 200-byte block.

it seems like what XML would buy you is a standard, extensible way of doing 
this encoding which is not you-specific. I've found sgml/xml to be quite
useful for encoding information in a _reusable_ way; using it here means it 
would be easier for someone else to look at your communications protocols
and write a new client or server that works with it.

James