xml files handling Re: cvs commit: maven-plugins/docbook plugin.jelly project.xml

[Tomasz Pik <pi...@ais.pl>]

On 2004-01-15 23:00, Ben Walding wrote:

> styles/* => These are probably the only things that would be caught up 
> by an LGPL license. As such I've removed them. I may reimplement them 
> soon / get some kind of release from Hibernate.

During using war/ear plugins I've found that it will be very useful
to have the possibility to verify deployment descriptors.
I know that validating against DTD is not enough but I think it's
worth a while to find some kind of general solution.
First thought was: just add war-related DTDs as resources for war
plugins and call xml-commons resolver-driven validation.
Same for other plugins.
But there're some problems with such attempt:
* DTDs should be embed into plugins;
* there's no way to add additonal verification like 'my webapp
   is using Castor so let's validate mapping.xml too during war
   build' because it's not clear where to put those DTDs;
Some of them have working SYSTEMID so may be loaded directly
during verification but this won't work offline and slow down
Maven.
Another idea that comes to me was to specify DTDs as deps, something
like
<dependency>
   <artifactId>webapp</artifactId>
   <groupId>servletapi</groupid>
   <version>2.3</version>
   <type>dtd</type>
</dependency>
but this is not enough because there's not enough information to
solve validation problem because there's no way to get PUBLIC/SYSTEM
IDs of given DTD having only DTD so some external info is needed.
In theory this may be added as properties in <dependency> but it's not
a good idea...
So at least it looks for me that with DTD there should be a catalog
entry defining DTD. So xml-validator may download all 'dtd', 'xsd',
'xslt', 'ent' and maybe other files and their 'cat' descriptors,
build one catalog for all of them and then validate given set of files.
This comes to a problem of having two things instead of one and this
is not playing good with Maven dependency model...

After all I think that it might be a good idea to define some kind
of 'xmlarchive' to handle XML in Maven-way. 'xar' or something like
this. With catalog file in META-INF and other files packaged as
java class files.
And finally, with such thing docbook plugin may rely on 'xar' package
containing DocBook stylesheets stored on iBiblio...

What's the opinion about all of this?
Regards,
Tomek

PS1 more about resolving and catalogs 
http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/resolver-article.html
PS2 I know Ant has all of this implemented but the problem is not
in calling validator but in locating DTD/XSD/XSLT files.



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