[Biojava-l] Possible Submission

[Thomas Down]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 09:58:27AM -0700, Robert Hubley wrote:
> 
> I have developed a parsing framework called LSAX that I would
> like to submit to BioJava.  It was inspired by the work of Cambridge
> Antibody Technology (Simon Brocklehurst et al.) on the BioJava
> BlastLikeSaxParser.  The idea is the same -- create a bridge
> between XML applications and Non-XML data.  The difference
> between the CAT parser and LSAX is in the design of the raw
> file parser.  I use LEX (actually JFLEX) to tokenize the raw
> data files and generate Start, Data, and End SAX events.  I have
> developed two parsers using this framework an NCBI Blast and
> a Fasta parser.  The advantage to using LEX is that you can specify
> the rules of your parser at a high level with regular expressions.  The
> actual parser is then auto-generated using JFLEX and is often times
> faster than a parser you would write by hand.

It sounds very cool -- anything which means less work writing
and maintaining parsers sounds a Good Thing to me :-).

Like Simon, I was a little concerned by the licencing issue.  However,
checking:

  http://www.jflex.de/copying.html

I see the following:

  The code generated by JFlex inherits the copyright of the specification 
  it was produced from. If it was your specification, you may use the 
  generated code without restriction.

Which I think puts us in the clear.  I can't see any problems
with using an extra GPLed tool at compile time.

Any other thoughts on this?

    Thomas.