C++ Serialization Clean XML Similar to XSTREAM
- by disown
I need to write a linux c++ app which saves it settings in XML format (for easy hand editing) and also communicates with existing apps through XML messages over sockets and HTTP. Problem is that I haven't been able to find any intelligent libs to help me, I don't particular feel like writing DOM or SAX code just to write and read some very simple messages.
Boost Serialization was almost a match, but it adds a lot of boost-specific data to the xml it generates. This obviously doesn't work well for interchange formats. I'm wondering if it is possible to make Boost Serialization or some other c++ serialization library generate clean xml. I don't mind if there are some required extra attributes - like a version attribute, but I'd really like to be able to control their naming and also get rid of 'features' that I don't use - tracking_level and class_id for instance.
Ideally I would just like to have something similar to xstream in Java. I am aware of the fact that c++ lacks introspection and that it is therefore necessary to do some manual coding - but it would be nice if there was a clean solution to just read and write simple XML without kludges!
If this cannot be done I am also interested in tools where the XML schema is the canonical resource (contract first) - a good JAXB alternative to C++. So far I have only found commercial solutions like CodeSynthesis XSD. I would prefer open source solutions. I have tried gSoap - but it generates really ugly code and it is also SOAP-specific.
In desperation I also started looking at alternative serialization formats for protobuffers. This exists - but only for Java! It really surprises me that protocol buffers seems to be a better supported data interchange format than XML.
I'm going mad just finding libs for this app and I really need some new ideas. Anyone?
