XMLBooster's SWIG Code generator

Together with SWIG (http://www.swig.org), one can use highly-optimized XMLBooster generated parsers from within dynamic languages such as Python (Other similar scripting languages are to follow). SWIG is a tool that exposes C libraries to a number of language and environments, so that a highly optimized primitives can be combined seamlessly from within dynamic and interactive languages, thereby aiming at providing the best of both worlds: the performance of C and the flexibility and interactivity of interpreted environments.

The SWIG code generator included in XMLBooster is based on the following assumptions:

• As one can expect, XMLBooster’s SWIG code generator is based on its C code generator.
• SWIG is a compiler that takes C declarations as input and creates the wrappers needed to access those declarations from other languages. The “.h” file produced by XMLBOOSTER is therefore annotated with special SWIG directives.
• Even if most of the machinery is strictly identical across target languages, XMLBooster has separate code generator for each of the different SWIG target it supports so that subtle differences can be taken into account.
• XMLBooster (or rather, SWIG) generates objects in the target scripting language to represent the data structures of the underlying XML document. These objects are just façades. SWIG creates accessor functions for each field of each element, and these functions will ultimately read and write field in the underlying C structure.