[XML-SIG] Python Wrapper for Xerces/Xalan

[W. Eliot Kimber]

Nicolas Chauvat wrote:
> 
> Is that available as (pythonic) free software?

Unfortunately, at the moment we can only contribute back the changes we
made to PyXML and 4Suite--our own stuff is still proprietary. However I
spoke with our CEO just yesterday about providing an open source version
of what we've got, which is all entirely Python based. She said she
would give it serious consideration.

One additional problem is that a key component of our stuff is a system
provided by another company and they have no plans to make *that* open
source, unfortunately. This is the grove and HyTime engine
implementation, which gives us a lot of functionality. The grove
component can be replaced with PyGrove, but the HyTime engine would be
non-trivial to replace (although not impossible--I've implemented a
HyTime engine in VB, so I know it can be done, I'm just not keen to do
it at the moment).

It's frustrating to me because I would really like to make all the stuff
we've done available to everyone, but current business realities (or
perceived realities) disallow it for now. I'm trying to sell my
employer, DataChannel, on the benefit of other integrators having easy
access to our software so they can develop additional add ons. I think
the 4Suite/Zope model is a good one and is appropriate for what we're
building, but it can be a tough sell in the company wasn't founded with
that model, which DataChannel was not (although we have contributed some
stuff to the Apache project, so there is some hope).

What we're building is the core components that are needed to build a
completely link-based, versioning information management system, where
the goal is to be able to manage arbitrarily complex versioned
hyperdocuments. We have explicitly designed it with a "business module"
plug-in framework that encourages the development of clearly-distinct
(from the core components) managed plug-ins that extend the system and
adapt it to specific use cases. We would like to see an aftermarket of
plug-ins. Because of the way we've implemented the system, it provides a
variety of configurations, from low-cost, low-scale, essentially
all-freeware system to high-cost, high-scale configurations using
enterprise-hardened stuff. I think that if we can make the low-cost
versions of the components available for free, that we'll see people
doing some really cool stuff with it for projects that need this kind of
functionality but that don't have any money to spend (or that require
open source, such as Doug Englebart's Open Hypermedia System project).

Anyway, we're trying to do what we can to contribute back to the
community.
 
Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
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W. Eliot Kimber | Lead Brain

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