ANN: bridge 0.2.4

[Sylvain Hellegouarch]

Hi all,

I am pleased to announce the release of bridge 0.2.4, a general purpose
XML library for Python and IronPython.

== Overview ==

bridge is very simple and light. It basically let you load an XML
document via a set of different parsers (xml.dom, expat, Amara, lxml,
System.Xml and ElementTree) and creates a tree of Elements and
Attributes before releasing the parser resources.

This means that once the document is loaded it is independent from the
underlying parser.

bridge then provides a straightforward interface to navigate through the
tree and manipulate it.

bridge does not try to replace underlying XML engines but offer a common
API so that your applications are less dependent of those engines.
bridge offers a couple of other goodies however to play with the tree of
elements (see the documentation).

== What's new? ==

This release is an important milestone for bridge:

 * added expat parser (seems to be the fatest parser bridge has)
 * many namespace issues fixed with the default parser
 * added incremental parsing with dispatching based on rules during the
parsing of bridge Elements
 * added path lookup support (not XPath)
 * slightly increased the API of a few helps functions

== TODO ==

Potentially the IronPython implementation is not as up-to-date as the
other parsers.

All parsers will generate the same bridge structure. The only minor
difference at the present time is coming from the lxml parser which does
not preserve processing instructions and comments before the root
element. bridge cannot therefore access them.

Add more unit tests.

== Download ==

 * easy_install -U bridge
 * Tarballs http://www.defuze.org/oss/bridge/
 * svn co https://svn.defuze.org/oss/bridge/

== Documentation ==

Wiki: http://trac.defuze.org/wiki/bridge

Have fun,
-- Sylvain Hellegouarch
http://www.defuze.org