[DAS2] imported data into bug tracker

[Andrew Dalke]

Ed:
> the DAS2 server interface could be to a C based parser written as a .so
> library...we have to write the code to do the parsing so it could 
> potentially
> form the basis of a DAS2 C parser...

Hopefully you'll pull out one of the existing XML parsers
instead of writing your own in C.  Getting everything right
is tricky, from what I understand.  Especially when dealing
with the various encoding issues (latin-1, utf-8, etc.)

You'll end up building your own data types, I assume.  Will
that include things like a native date/time type or will
clients need to parse the ISO string locally?

I assume it's passed a string?  If not, will it take a
FILE *?  Or will it be able to do the network connections
too?  If the latter, how will it work with proxies and
other tedious details?  If it's just a string then client
libraries will still have to do some implementation work.

My library will try to fix up known problems, eg, massage
the input XML if it comes from a server that's known
to have certain bugs.

Supporting these in C would be, I think, a lot of work.

Though if you used libxml2 and kept the data structure as
its DOM and didn't worry about I/O ... Hmmm....

					Andrew
					dalke at dalkescientific.com