[kde-community] msoscheme joining kde

[Jos van den Oever]

Hello all,

Calligra relies on a project called MSOScheme. This project generates Java and 
C++ from an XML description of the Microsoft Office binary file formats.

The project used to be on Gitorious. Gitorious closed and MSOScheme needs a 
new home.

The code is not moving very fast and currently only Calligra uses it. The code 
only supports MS Office files, but it would be great to support more file formats. 

Writing XML instead of code for parsing and serializing has great advantages. 
You prevent many memory errors and can work on optimization without 
understanding all the separate file formats. This approach helped Calligra to 
have very fast MS Office parsers. At the time this was needed for running well 
on Nokia Maemo and Meego phones.

As an example of the flexibility, there are 3 types of C++ generated. One that 
can parse with zero allocations, one that is a bit more easy to use but does 
use allocations and a third one that has full introspection on the parsed data 
and can output it as an XML tree for easy debugging or conversion with XML 
tools.

https://gitorious.org/msoscheme/msoscheme.git/

I believe the project could be useful for more than just Calligra. I'm writing 
a small demo to create a parser for tar files as a simple tutorial.

Best regards,
Jos van den Oever