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Hello,

I really like coding ruby or ruby on rails apps, but rexml often leads to
frustration.
- If I use xpath in watir-tests rexml takes plenty of time evaluating and
execution time jumps from seconds to minutes.
- Some rails apps I've written rely on rexml and xpath as well. I
encountered strange xpath-results that mysteriously went away when
upgrading ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6.
By that, rails apps using xpath developed on my laptop (Debian Lenny, Ruby
1.8.6) might fail in production on servers running debian etch.

Since Ruby does support C/C++ bindings, I wonder if anyone have tried to use
xerces instead (Googling for ruby-xerces shows a few posts but nothing
serious) or if there are any other alternatives to rexml.

Do you know any?
Thanks in advance,
Keep smiling
yanosz

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

You can try libxml-ruby, I hear it's been rewritten and should be working
pretty well now. Otherwise there's hpricot, while not supporting real XPATH,
can get you pretty far. But libxml-ruby will be faster.

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Jan Luehr <> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I really like coding ruby or ruby on rails apps, but rexml often leads to
> frustration.
> - If I use xpath in watir-tests rexml takes plenty of time evaluating and
> execution time jumps from seconds to minutes.
> - Some rails apps I've written rely on rexml and xpath as well. I
> encountered strange xpath-results that mysteriously went away when
> upgrading ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6.
> By that, rails apps using xpath developed on my laptop (Debian Lenny, Ruby
> 1.8.6) might fail in production on servers running debian etch.
>
> Since Ruby does support C/C++ bindings, I wonder if anyone have tried to
> use
> xerces instead (Googling for ruby-xerces shows a few posts but nothing
> serious) or if there are any other alternatives to rexml.
>
> Do you know any?
> Thanks in advance,
> Keep smiling
> yanosz
>
>

On 13.09.2008 12:08, Jan Luehr wrote:
> - Some rails apps I've written rely on rexml and xpath as well. I
> encountered strange xpath-results that mysteriously went away when
> upgrading ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6.

Did you investigate this? It may well be that there were bugs in 1.8.2
that have been removed in 1.8.6.

Kind regards

robert