[dfdl-wg] Prototyping Progress

[Tom Sugden]

Hi all,

I've been reading draft DFDL spec and scoping doc, and playing around
a little with a prototype implementation of an event-based DFDL
processor. Unfortunately my time has been limited because the effort
has not been scheduled here at EPCC.

The general idea is to first generate an internal representation of a
DFDL schema. This object model should be easier to work with than a
DOM Document and will provide access to the context within scope for
each element of the object model, including the supported conversions.

For a read scenario, an instance of this object model can be traversed
while the underlying data stream is processed into a sequence of DFDL
events. At the moment the proto-type supports the example given in
section 12.2 of the scoping document. A push-parse is currently
implemented, though a pull-parse should also be possible.

I'm sorry for regularly missing the telcons. I was away for a while
getting married and honeymooning, then got stuck in a meeting on
Wednesday. Next week I'm teaching at the grid summer school, but I
hope to resume some DFDL work the week after that.

Looking forward to seeing developments in the new specification document.

Cheers,
Tom