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School's out for the summer. Looks like I'll be graduating from Langara college with an Associates of Computer Science degree, and then going into 3rd-ish year of Computer Science at UBC in the fall. Pretty nifty.
I didn't score the lab aiding job I was looking for for the summer, but I have managed it seems to get some contracting work for web development, PHP/MySQL/Javascript stuff. Hopefully it will be reasonably bountiful all summer long, UBC ain't cheap.
Also, on my own time I've been reading up on XML libraries and http libraries. As you might be able to guess I'm looking at doing a project that involves HTTP and XML, so picking good libraries would make life so much easier. I want something that obviously has a good API and is actively maintained. So I dug up what projects I could and checked their homepage for mission statement, last release, and used Gentoo's equery to see how many packages in Portage depended on each one for a crude popularity metric. Popularity doesn't mean good, but it can give you at least an indication of what has been working for lots of people. The results as summarized and interpreted by me:
XML libraries
- expat: (221) seems pretty popular, been around for a while, but slow development. Last release, 2.0, was January 2006
- libxml2: (882) Quite powerful looking xml library. Big with the Gnome crowd I believe. Fairly active development. And looks quite popular.
HTTP Libraries
- libwww: (29) The W3C's contribution, used by a handful of projects, but sadly, last updated 2002.
- libcurl: (241) Active development, somewhat popular, but marred by a need for a one time two part global initiation. I'm not sure how it could be worked into a library, and still allow the using app to also use libcurl. The whole API seems a bit not good. Origional design was not sufficent but they didn't want to break backwards compatibility so you have lots of functionName2s floating around. It's kind of ugly.
- libsoup: (57) Gnome's HTTP library, GObject based for better Gnome app integration. Active development.
- neon: (47) Somewhat slow, but still active development. Also has XML handling facilities! Also, apparently used by GNOME VFS. I think a newcomer to the game somewhat.
