[Python-Dev] Proposed contribution to the library: PAX (another XML library)

[Lalo Martins]

PAX - the "Pythonic API for XML" - is a XML-handling library.

Like with DOM, you're supposed to first parse the whole stream into the
internal representation, and then operate on it.

What distinguishes PAX is that its implementation is python-oriented; you
iterate trough child nodes via the normal ways (for, getitem, and in 2.2+,
an iterator), the attributes are dictionary-based, etc.

I used it to successfully reimplement TAL and PageTemplates (used in Zope).
This reimplementation (AltPT) is quite stable and in production users in a
few dozen servers around the world.

PAX also includes a powerful python-oriented transform engine, which I used
in Alt-TAL.

The code has been tested on Python 2.1, 2.2 and recent CVS checkouts.  It
not only works, but transparently uses recent interesting features when
available - notably, enumerate().

Most of the code is in public domain, and of course I make no objections to
switching to PSL.  In fact the package was designed all along with the
intention of offering it to the standard library (and I like to think that
this led me to cleaner design and a readable implementation).

It is in active maintenence; if not much development happened in the last
few months, it's because it reached some maturity.  In fact I just released
1.0alpha1 before sending this mail (15k tar.bz2)

PAX has a small site at my very-slow (due to bad connectivity) Zope server
at http://python.laranja.org/pax/ - this site, btw, runs on AltPT.  The
releases can be found there, and the cvs is (for hystorical reasons) at
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/flyingcircus
module miscfiles/python/pax (because it was originally developed as I needed
an XML library for my "flyingcircus" pda project).

Should I write a PEP?  Or a patch (silly, it would be a quite big patch)?

[]s,
                                               |alo
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