[JDEV] Well-formed XML.

Thu Jan 21 15:02:30 CST 1999

One hackish solution to this problem in Java is to create a custom
InputStream like this:

public class JabberInputStream extends InputStream
{
  InputStream inputs[];
  InputStream current;
  int index;

  InputStream input;

  public JabberInputStream(InputStream input)
  {
    this.input = input;
    inputs = new InputStream[3];
    inputs[0] = new StringBufferInputStream("<jabber>");
    inputs[1] = input;
    inputs[2] = new StringBufferInputStream("</jabber>");
    index = 0;
    current = inputs[index];
  }

  public void close() throws IOException { input.close(); }
  public int read() throws IOException
  {
    try {
      return current.read();
    } catch (EOFException eofe) {
      if (index >= inputs.length) throw eofe
      index++;
      current = inputs[index];
      return current.read();
    }
  }
}

By passing the above class to the XML parsing library, it will basically
wrap the <jabber> .. </jabber> tags around whatever was originally going
to be there.

However, I agree it would be really nice if the protocol required an
entire connection to be wrapped in a surrounding tag.

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Jason Diamond wrote:

> Hi, I have another protocol related suggestion. I've been experimenting
> with a Java client and have been using several of the major XML parsers
> to test it out. Apparently, a well-formed XML document needs to have a
> single root element. Much like the root <html><!-- everything else goes
> here --></html> element in HTML. All of the parsers I've tried so far,
> stopped parsing at the second <j> element. There are several ugly
> workarounds but I think it would be much more conducive to our goals if
> we could take any off the shelf XML parser and not have to modify it in
> order to write a Jabber client. So, I propose that both the server and
> client wrap all their messages in a root <jabber></jabber> element.
> Attributes could be used to specify the client and protocol much like
> the current <j type='connection'> element. Maybe something like this:
> 
> <jabber agent='Jabzilla v1.0' protocol='19990121'>
>   <j type='login'><user>foo</user><pass>bar</pass></j>
>   <!-- etc. -->
> </jabber>
> 
> The end </jabber> element could be used to indicate that the server or
> client is getting ready to close the connection. Comments? I'm in the
> process of downloading Cygwin32 so that I can make the necessary changes
> to the server to test it out.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, why are all the messages between client and
> server wrapped in a <j type='foo'> element? Why not <login> or
> <message>? If we used element names rather than attribute types to
> distinguish the purpose of a message, we could create a DTD specifying
> what elements are allowed to be nested in others. For example, <user>
> and <pass> would only be allowed in a <login> element. I'm not proposing
> that we validate the XML as it comes in from the server, but it could be
> used as a specification. Much like EBNF is for more traditional
> protocols. And who knows, maybe while implementing and debugging our
> clients we could have it validate the XML as an aid to determine a
> source of errors.
> 
> Bye,
> Jason.
> 
> 
> 

Quetzalcoatl Bradley
qbradley at csc.uvic.ca