Going to have to try eclim

Image via Wikipedia

For my MSc project I made heavy use of the Eclipse IDE to write various Groovy programs that took an XML input and output an SVG (of course SVG is XML also, but I hope you understand).

Groovy was a great choice as, while not as fast as C, for instance, it was easy to write something that could hack XML and SVG – all I had to worry about was the algorithm as much of the infrastructure for handling the file formats was to hand.

And Eclipse made perfect sense as the IDE as it had good Groovy support.

But my problem was I am a VIM user most of the time and so there was more than one time when I had to go back and clean up the :w mess I had left behind.

Now, it seems, there may be a solution to hand – eclim – which allows me to use VIM in Eclipse and vice versa. I will try it in the next few days and see how I get on.

Related articles

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• Introducing the lackeyml format (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
• Using XSLT to manipulate an SVG file (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
• SVG, JavaScript and the DOM (i-programmer.info)
• Editing Labels in QGIS SVG Output using Inkscape (underdark.wordpress.com)
• R 2.14 for Windows: now with SVG support (r-bloggers.com)
• Playing with SVG Design (webdesignerwall.com)

XSL problem solved (sort of)

I half remembered doing something like this before … and it works: though I don’t know if this is a bug in xsltproc or what…

To get the stylesheet to work I have to delete the namespace declaration in the svg tag in the graph – ie change

<svg width="1000px" height="800px" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">

to this:

<svg width="1000px" height="800px" version="1.1">

and then run xsltproc with --novalid specified.

Will enquire further on the appropriate mailing list.

Related articles

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• Using XSLT to manipulate an SVG file (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
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XML: any use?

I stumbled across the site XMLSucks.com just now when reading a comment on slashdot about the idea that there was an FBI mandated “backdoor” in OpenBSD.

Right now I am working on some coursework with XML and so the site has my sympathy. For sure, XML has its uses – SVG seems like a pretty good idea to me and I have used it recently to generate graphics to represent the processes running on a Linux box.

But freely mixing it with HTML on the web? I am inclined to (mostly) agree with the statement on the site:

XML is bloated. XMLis fugly. XML is only “human-readable” if you’re willing to stretch the definition of “human-readable.” The same goes for the proposed bloatware of HTML5. Anyone looking at the spec must be shaking their heads. Sure, it’s better than the now-abandoned xhtml 2.0, but that’s not saying much. I