Some of you know that I’m a developer on Adium. (Hopefully all of you; it is mentioned in the sidebar. ;)

Adium has a feature called “message history”. When you open a new chat with a person, message history shows you the last n messages from your previous chat with that person. Since 1.0 (which changed message history to draw from the logs rather than separate storage and changed the log format to be XML rather than bastardized HTML—more info on the Adium blog post), message history has been implemented using a library that I wrote called LMX.

LMX is a reverse XML parser. Whereas most XML parsers (AFAIK, all of them except LMX) parse the XML data from the start to the end, LMX parses it from the end to the start. Thus, while characters are kept in their original order (“foo” will still be “foo”; it will not become “oof”), everything else is reported in the reverse order: elements close before they are opened, and appear from last to first. All this is by design, so that Adium can retrieve the last n message elements without having to parse all the message elements before them.

Today, LMX gets its very own webpage (not just a page on the Adium wiki, but a real webpage), and is released at version 1.0. It’s the same code as shipped with Adium 1.0.1, but shined up into a release tarball.

So, if you too ever find yourself in desperate need of a reverse XML parser, now there is one.

Categories: Adium; Creations; LMX. | Comments: 15 (feed). | Trackback.