ReactiveSax

What

ReactiveSax is a tiny, non-validating, reactive SAX parser for Scala. It does not implement the org.xml.sax.Parser interface (as do SAX1 parsers), nor the org.xml.sax.XMLReader interface (as do SAX2 parsers). Instead, it extends the java.io.Writer class, and provides a write method. When you write character data to the parser, it will be parsed character-by-character by the parser's state machine, and the provided org.xml.sax.ContentHandler will receive SAX events as appropriate. After you write the data, nothing else happens until you write more data, at which point parsing will pick up where it left off.

Why

ReactiveSax arose from a fundamental flaw with SAX that makes it incompatible with the reactive programming model. The idea of SAX is great for reactive programming in that it is a push model - events are pushed to the next thing in the pipeline, which does some processing and pushes stuff to the next thing, etc. Unfortunately, the XMLReader interface defines a parse method, which calls parse up the chain until the actual parser is reached; that method takes an InputSource parameter, which must provide an InputStream. And therein lies the flaw - an InputStream is a blocking I/O, which is fundamentally a blocking pull. This goes against the push model of SAX and makes it unsuitable for reactive programming using Future or Task. If a bunch of parsers block all the threads waiting for input, and their ability to pull input relies on other bits of your program pushing data (into, let's say, a java.nio.Pipe or java.io.PipedWriter) then you'll have a deadlock on your hands.

Frustrated with this small piece of bad decision making (which arose from a failure to predict non-blocking I/O as a thing), I came up with ReactiveSax.

Cons

This package was written to address my current needs only. There's a lot it doesn't do, and so to say it complies with any particular standard would be completely incorrect.

• It does no validation of any kind
• It will happily continue trying to parse a malformed document (except in cases of certain catastrophic parse errors)
• It does nothing with DTDs or other declarations like <!THING>
• It doesn't process any entities besides &, <, >, ", and valid numeric entities (except to provide a skippedEntity(name) event to the ContentHandler)
• It produces no errors for an ErrorHandler. In the catastrophic cases mentioned above, it throws an exception.
• It does no resolution of any external anything. It will never make a network request for any reason, nor attempt to resolve anything.

Pros / Features

• It is based on a deterministic finite state automaton
  • So it's very fast
  • And it needs very little memory
• It supports namespaces
• It only parses while it's being pushed input, so parsing can be paused at any time
  • In other words, parsing will never block or wait for anything

Usage

The companion object SAXPushParser has two apply methods. Don't call the constructor of SAXPushParser directly.

To create an instance, if you already have the ContentHandler you'll be using:

val handler = new MyContentHandler
val sax = ReactiveSax(handler)
sax.write("<xml></xml>")

This makes the ContentHandler immutable.

To create an instance, if you're planning to set the ContentHandler later (this is discouraged):

val sax = ReactiveSax()
//...
sax.setContentHandler(handler)
sax.write("<xml></xml>")

Internally, this creates an identity XMLFilter and that it passes SAX events to, and setContentHandler calls the same on that XMLFilter. So it gives you some flexibility to set up your ContentHandler later on, but you must remember to do so, and you have no guarantee that you won't be switching handlers around willy-nilly causing problems.

License

reactivesax is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this software except in compliance with the License.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

FAQ

These questions aren't frequently asked. In fact, nobody has ever asked me a question about this project. But these are some questions that you might be having if you're reading this README.

1. Why don't you implement the XMLReader interface? How am I supposed to use this?

   A: As mentioned above, you should call open and then write in order to parse some data. Implementing XMLReader would require implementing the parse(InputSource) method, which is fundamentally blocking/pull.

2. Is SAXPushParser thread safe?

A: No - whenever data is written, it will try to process it. You shouldn't write data from multiple threads simultaneously. If you find this happening, you should be sequencing your Futures more carefully. Typically, a thread that's getting character data from somewhere (a computation, or an event-driven input source, etc) will be writing that data out to the parser in order to pipe character input into a SAX pipeline.