Mailing-List: contact ant-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
From: costin@eng.sun.com
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2000 14:04:02 -0800 (PST)
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: What flavour of scripting?
In-Reply-To: <38C0925E.EE043EDE@apache.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10003051355550.19882-100000@costin>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

> > The only problem used to be that you can't have &java.home; or define new
> > entities with -Danme=value using normal DOM ( AFAIK ). With SAX is trivial
> > - DocumentHandler can resolve entities to anything.
> 
> Nope... There's no standard way for resolving entity references outside
> the scope of the parser. Do remember that the EntityResolver interface
> does not resolve entity references, but entities themselves, translating
> Public+System IDs into InputSources.
> 
> Probably it's better to stick with the current stuff...

Yes, it may not be so easy, but I still think we should use the same
rules and semantic for constants, with a different syntax.

I was thinking of external entities used for command line parameters or 
java properties. Like:

<!ENTITY java_home SYSTEM "java:java.home" > 
<!ENTITY command_line_foo SYSTEM "param:foo" > 

and using resolveEntity( pubId, systemId) to get the value.

But we should listen the xml experts :-), do we have any other
trick/magic we can use?


Costin