[Jfresnel-devel] Fresnel Display Language support check-in

[Recker, John Ludd]

I checked in some code to the Jfresnel svn hierarchy to add support 
for rendering the core Fresnel Display Language using Jena (there is no 
support for Sesame).

Some random thoughts.

1) The source requires the 2.5 release of Jena.
2) The source follows a similar strategy as the Simile code. In
particular,
   I created a renderer class which takes as input a FresnelDocument &
   a FresnelJenaEvaluator and produces a w3c.dom.Document as output.
   This can, in turn, be converted using Java libraries and xslt
programs into
   xml or html if required.
3) I have added a new example directory which includes a (rather simple)
example
   of how one might use the new Renderer class. This directory includes
a
   xslt & xsd file substantially based on Simile code (which carries a
different,
   though less constraining, license). The css file is quite simple as
well, but 
   hopefully provides at least a proof of concept.
4) There is, unfortunately, still work to be done. Hopefully most of the
missing
   functionality is identified in the source by either TODO or XXX
tagged comments,
   but the corner cases of this language are subtle and there are likely
   other gotcha's hidden in the code. On a more positive note, however,
I have
   successfully generated w3c.dom.Document's that validate against the
Simile xsd
   and produce useful XML files.
5) I will hopefully add some junit tests to support some of this work.
For now,
   however, one should consider this relatively untested code.


A couple of other details regarding the source.

1) I included more details of the GPL license in the source files I
created than
   exist in other project files as the license details are not included
when 
   checking out the code from the SVN tree, which I thought left open
the 
   possibility for confusion.
2) I use Eclipse as a development environment, and I realized as I
checked in the
   code that I have not tested the build.xml ant file. I see no reason
why it won't 
   work, but I have not tested this either.


I'd be interested in hearing about anyone's experiences (positive or
negative) with this code.

John Recker