Contributing to the BDE Alternatives Guide

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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NOTE: This site is no longer being updated; it is up for "Adoption" to anyone who would like to take over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).