Daniel Carrera
10/26/2003 12:44:00 AM
Greetings all,
Some of you might remember me. I used to be in this list, but school has
kept me out of the loop for several months.
I'm trying to re-subscribe, but the ctl address isn't working. Until I
get that sorted out, I'll have to ask you to put my email on the CC line.
I plan on starting a simple project, and I want to try to do it in Ruby.
Lately I have become interested in the OpenOffice.org project, and am
fairly active in the users mailing list. I have seen several requests for
a program that can search for text inside OpenOffice.org files.
OOo SXW files are actually fairly simple conceptually. They are a
collection of XML files packed in a ZIP archive. That's it. I have
already used Perl to write a couple of tiny programs to manipulate SXW
files.
So, I guess that my project requirements are:
1) An XML library.
After looking through RAA, I think I'll pick XMLSimple and REXML.
2) A ZIP librry.
I need some help here. I saw "ruby-zlib" in RAA, but I can't find
any documentation. Is it good? All I need ZIP for is to extract
one file from a ZIP archive. That's it.
3) Portability (since OOo is cross-platform).
This is tricker, but this is also part of what made me think of Ruby. OOo
users are roughly speaking 60% Windows, 40% Linux (at least, on the
list). The Windows users are technicially competent, but not savvy. I
have no qualms asking them to download some dependencies, but most won't
have a compiler.
Are there any suggestions on the best way to approach this?
--
Daniel Carrera | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. |
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".