http://xml.apache.org/http://www.apache.org/http://www.w3.org/

Home

Readme
Release Info

Installation
Download
Build Instructions

FAQs
Samples
API Docs

DOM C++ Binding
Programming
Migration Guide

Feedback
Bug-Reporting
PDF Document

CVS Repository
Mail Archive

Questions
 


What platforms / compilers are being used to build the binary distribution kits?
 

Xerces binaries has been built on the following platforms with these compilers

Operating System  Compiler 
32-bit binary   
Windows NT  MS Visual C++ 6.0 SP3 
AIX 5.1  xlC_r 6.0.0 
Solaris 2.8  Forte C++ Version 6 Update 2 
HP-UX 11i  aCC A.03.52 with pthreads 
Redhat Linux 8.0 (IA32)  gcc 3.2 
64-bit binary   
AIX 5.1  xlC_r 6.0.0 
Solaris 2.8  Forte C++ Version 6 Update 2 
HP-UX 11i  aCC A.03.52 with pthreads 
SuSE Linux 8.0 (AMD64)  gcc 3.2.2 

What are the differences between Xerces-C and XML4C?
 

Xerces-C has intrinsic support for ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (Big/Small Endian), UCS4 (Big/Small Endian), EBCDIC code pages IBM037, IBM1047 and IBM1140 encodings, ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin1) and Windows-1252. This means that it can parse input XML files in these above mentioned encodings.

However, if you wish to parse XML files in any other encodings, say in Shift-JIS, Big5 etc., then you cannot use Xerces-C. XML4C addresses this need. It combines Xerces-C and International Components for Unicode (ICU) and provides support for over 100 different encodings. XML4C also uses ICU Resource Bundle to load the messages.

ICU is also an open source project but is licensed under the X License. Information about XML4C is available at Alphaworks site.


Which DLL's do I need to distribute with my application?
 

You only need to distribute one file:
xerces-c_2_6_0.dll for Windows NT/2000, or
libxerces-c26.0.so for AIX, or
libxerces-c.so.26.0 for Solaris/Linux, or
libxerces-c.sl.26.0 for HP-UX.

However, if you are using the ICU transcoder then in addition to the library file mentioned above, you also need to ship:

  1. ICU shared library file:
    icuuc*.dll for Windows NT/2000, or
    libicuuc*.a for AIX, or
    libicuuc*.so for Solaris/Linux, or
    libicuuc*.sl for HP-UX.
  2. ICU converter data shared library file:
    icudt*.dll for Windows NT/2000, or
    libicudt*.a for AIX, or
    libicudt*.so for Solaris/Linux, or
    libicudt*.sl for HP-UX.
  3. The Xerces-C++ Message file:
    XercesMessages*.dll for Windows NT/2000, or
    libXercesMessages*.a for AIX, or
    libXercesMessages*.so for Solaris/Linux, or
    libXercesMessages*.sl for HP-UX.

How do I package the sources to create a binary drop?
 

You have to first compile the sources inside your IDE to create the required DLLs and EXEs. Then you need to copy over the binaries to another directory for the binary drop. A perl script has been provided to give you a jump start. You need to install perl on your machine for the script to work. If you have changed your source tree, you have to modify the script to suit your current directory structure. To invoke the script, go to the \<Xerces>\scripts directory, and type:

perl packageBinaries.pl

You will get a message that somewhat looks like this (changes always happen, we are evolving you see!):

Usage is: packageBinaries <options>
options are:  -s <source_directory>
              -o <target_directory>
              -c <C compiler name> (e.g. gcc or xlc_r)
              -x <C++ compiler name> (e.g. g++ or xlC_r)
              -m <message loader> can be 'inmem', 'icu' or 'iconv'
              -n <net accessor> can be 'fileonly' or 'libwww'
              -t <transcoder> can be 'icu' or 'native'
              -r <thread option> can be 'pthread' or 'dce' (only used on HP-11)
              -h to get help on these commands
Example: perl packageBinaries.pl -s$HOME/xerces-c-src2_6_0
                                 -o$HOME/xerces-c2_6_0
                                 -cgcc -xg++ -minmem
                                 -nfileonly -tnative

Make sure that your compiler can be invoked from the command line and follow the instructions to produce a binary drop.


I do not see binaries for my platform. When will they be available?
 

The reason why you see binaries only for some specific platforms is that we have had the maximum requests for them. Moreover, we have limited resources and hence cannot publish binaries for every platform. If you wish to contribute your time and effort in building binaries for a specific platform/environment then please send a mail to the Xerces-C++ mailing list. We can definitely use any extra help in this open source project


When will a port to my platform be available?
 

We would like to see Xerces ported to as many platforms as there are. Again, due to limited resources we cannot do all the ports. We will help you make this port happen. Here are some Porting Guidelines.

We strongly encourage you to submit the changes that are required to make it work on another platform. We will incorporate these changes in the source code base and make them available in the future releases.

All porting changes may be sent to the Xerces-C++ mailing list .


How can I port Xerces to my favourite platform?
 

Here are some Porting Guidelines.


What application do you use to create the documentation?
 

We have used an internal XML based application to create the documentation. The documentation files are all written in XML and the application, internally codenamed StyleBook, makes use of XSL to transform it into an HTML document that you are seeing right now. It is currently available on the Apache open source website as Cocoon.

The API documentation is generated using Doxygen and GraphViz.

See FAQ: Regenerating (API) documention?


Can I use Xerces in my product?
 

Yes! Read the license agreement first and if you still have further questions, then please address them to the Xerces-C++ mailing list .


How do I uninstall Xerces-C++?
 

Xerces-C++ only installs itself in a single directory and does not set any registry entries. Thus, to uninstall, you only need to remove the directory where you installed it, and all Xerces-C++ related files will be removed.


I am getting a tar checksum error on Solaris. What's the problem?
 

The problem is caused by a limitation in the original tar spec, which prevented it from archiving files with long pathnames. Unfortunately, various current versions of tar use different extensions for eliminating this restriction which are incompatible with each other (or they do not remove the restriction at all). Rather than altering the pathnames for the Xerces-C++ package, which would make them compatible with the original tar spec but make it more difficult to know what was where, it was decided to use GNU tar (gtar), which handles arbitrarily long pathnames and is freely available on every platform on which Xerces-C++ is supported. If you don't already have GNU tar installed on your system, you can obtain it from the Free Software Foundation http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/tar.html. For additional background information on this problem, see the online manual GNU tar and POSIX tar for the utility.



Copyright © 1999-2004 The Apache Software Foundation. All Rights Reserved.