Contributing New or Updated Data
NOTE: This site is no longer being updated; it is up
for "Adoption" to anyone who would like to take over
In order to make it easy and efficient to keep this Guide up to date,
there is now a mechanism by which vendors and other interested users will
be able to directly contributed updated data, in a form ready to put on
this site.
To send in updata data for a product already here:
The process is simple:
- Download the XML data file for the product you want to update. There
is a link at the bottom of theproduct page; right click it and choose
"save as". Re-download it right before you plan to edit
it, since an update could appear at any time.
- Download the DTD here, again by right
clicking on the link. Save this in the same directory as where you saved
the product XML file.
- Make your changes to the XML file. Use an appropriate text or XML
editor.
- Important: verify that your modified file is well-formed and compliant
to the DTD. An easy way to do that is to open the file in Internet Explorer;
Internet Explorer will show an error message if there is a problem with
the XML, or will display the XML if the format is correct.. If you send
in a file which does not parse as valid XML, or is missing the DTD declaration,
it will probably be a long time before I get to looking at it to clean
it up. Perhaps a programmer out there would like to make this process
even easier - see below.
- Once you are sure the file is right, email the file to me: (address
removed) .
To send in data for new product to add:
Follow the same process as the above, but use one of the XML files for
another product as a starting point. Be sure to remove all bits of data
about the product whose file you started with.
The XML data format
- Right now, the format of the XML data is documented mostly by the
DTD and by the examples already on the site.
- The "shortname" field should be all lower case, and should
match the name of the data files (but without the XML extention).
- There is a new element, <kylixvers></kylixvers>, which
is optional (right after cppbvers). Use it to indicate which Kylix versions
the product supports.
How the HTML Is Generated:
The BDE Alternatives Guide is generated using XML and XSLT. I use a Python
script (one of my favorite languages for "glue") to loop over
all of the XML files and process each through an XSL engine to produce
an HTML file. In the process, the summary data is gathered and placed
in another XML file, which is transformed using other XSL templates to
create the summary
pages. It was a bit of an adventure figuring
out how to acheive those groups in XSLT, but was worth the effort.
Help Wanted:
I'm looking for volunteers to help with several aspects of this:
- Contribute updated information about existing and new products
- Write a program which makes it easy to update these XML data files;
this could be a client-side application, written in the language of
your choice, or a server-side web application/script written in Python,
Perl, PHP, Ruby, or other language commonly available on Linux-based
web servers (like the one where this site is hosted).
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