fxp is a validating XML parser, written completely in the functional programming language SML. It has a programming interface allowing for production of XML applications based on fxp.
fxp was written by Andreas Neumann, University of Trier (neumann (AT) psi.uni-trier.de) and Alexandru Berlea, TU Munich (berlea (AT) in.tum.de). This repository also contains patches collected by Timothy Bourke (see http://www.tbrk.org/software/sml-fxp.html) and a few other fixes to improve compatibility with more recent compiler systems.
The following example applications are included:
-
fxp- The pure parser. It parses a document and finds well-formedness errors, validity errors and other problems; -
fxcanon- Produces an equivalent canonical XML document. Canonical XML was invented by James Clark for testing XML parsers. It contains only the information a processor is required to pass to the application; -
fxcopy- Reproduces the document parsed by fxp. The copy can be generated in a different encoding than the input, and can be normalized in different ways concerning, e.g., expansion of entity references; -
fxesis- Produces an output similar to nsgmls's ESIS (Element Structure Information Set) output; -
fxviz- An XML tree visualizer. It produces a graph description suitable as input to Georg Sander's vcg.
fxp's API is described in doc/api.ps.
The MLB file src/fxlib.mlb lists the library sources, and each of
the command-line utilities has its own .mlb file. So to build, for
example, the canon utility:
$ cd src/Apps/Canon
$ mlton canon.mlb
Compilation Manager (CM) files are provided, as well as a Makefile
that invokes them. The Makefile is retained from the original fxp
sources and may not be current. See the section "Historical build
instructions" below for more details.
For each of the MLB build files, a corresponding file poly-*.ML is
provided that pulls in the same sources via use declarations. So to
build, for example, the canon utility:
$ cd src/Apps/Canon
$ polyc -o canon poly-canon.ML
Copyright 1999-2004 Andreas Neumann and Alexandru Berlea. See the file
COPYRIGHT for more information about licensing.
These are the steps described in the original fxp distribution for installing fxp under Unix:
1. Download the latest version of fxp;
2. Unpack the sources, and change to the fxp directory, e.g.:
gunzip -c fxp-2.0.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd fxp-2.0
3. Read the COPYRIGHT;
4. Edit the Makefile according to your needs. Probably you will only have
to change the following:
INSTALL_PROGS is the list of programs to be installed. fxlib is only
required if you want to develop applications with fxp.
FXP_BINDIR is where the executables are installed;
FXP_LIBDIR is where other files needed by fxp - the heap images
and the library - are installed;
SML_BINDIR is the directory where the SML executables are found.
It must contain the .arch-n-opsys script from the
SML-NJ distribution, so make sure that this is where
SML-NJ is physically installed;
SML_EXEC is the name of the SML executable. This is the program
that is called for generating the heap image and at
execution of fxp. If sml is in your PATH at
installation time, you don't need the full path here.
SML_MAKEDEF is for defining the make command in SML. After version
110.0.3, SML-NJ changed the type of CM.make'.
For earlier or working versions of SML-NJ, use the
second or third variant of this definition.
5. Edit the file src/config.sml according to your needs. Currently only a
single value can be configured here:
val retrieveCommand : string
is the command to be used by fxp for retrieving a remote URI from
the internet and storing it in a temporary file on the local file
system. It is a string value and should contain the strings %1
and %2, where:
- %1 is replaced by the URI;
- %2 is replaced by the local filename.
It is recommended that the command exits with failure in case the
URI cannot be retrieved. If the command generates an HTML error
message instead (like, e.g., "lynx -source %1 > %2"), this HTML
file is considered to be XML and will probably cause a mess of
parsing errors. If you don't need URI retrieval, use "exit 1"
which always fails on Unix. Sensible values are, e.g:
- "wget -qO %2 %1"
(ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/wget/)
- "got_it -o %2 %1"
(ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/www/
mirroring/got_it-0.34.tar.gz)
- "urlget -s -o %2 %1"
(ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/www/
mirroring/urlget-3.12.tar.gz)
6. Compile fxp by typing make;
7. Install fxp by typing make install.
8. If you want to use fxviz, you should also install vcg
(ftp://ftp.cs.uni-sb.de/pub/graphics/vcg/).