Tuesday, March 26, 2013

btrxml

Parsing XML; while not really an ideal solution for game technology, it has its uses.  XML is useful for data exchange between programs in a somewhat human readable form.

Well, games are all about machine readable form and could care less about the human part; I mean really, only programmers have to care about game data, and they are barely human as it is anyways... at any rate, converting text to binary is not a good way to tackle large, complex data; especially since text (ascii/unicode/whatever) is problematic in and of itself.

So, it came to pass that we needed to parse XML and either make a conversion method per project and implement plugins, or just implement XML directly in to our programs.  We did just that and open-sourced it and put it on sourceforge under the zlib license.  It is written in C and should be used solely to consume well-formed XML.  It cuts a lot of features out of a normal parser, can't output, but does use a DOM structure.  The idea here is that it should be used to eat XML quickly and efficiently on devices with little memory.

I've never contributed to FOSS stuff before and I never though I'd see the day that I would, but here it is.  I look forward to maintaining this project (it's only 2 files as is it!) and seeing where this project gets implemented in to the future.

The project can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/btrxml/