xmlTree - minimalistic XML processor for PHP

Friday, March 30, 2007

xmlTree is a tiny, little XML processor for PHP that doesn't even offer 10% of what the XML spec has to offer, but still manages to do almost everything a normal developer needs (and besides, it's easy to extend). It's meant for all those people that

Hate to use code that they cannot possibly understand
Prefer small libraries
Don't expect the XML Library to validate their data
Don't need the XML library to handle data that's not trustworthy
Don't need automatic character conversion, like " to \" or <>

So, it's really quite minimalistic. It was initially written to store configuration data for another program, but ended but managing quite a bit of the HTML code too.
Essentially, it provides the following features:

An XMLElement class that provides parentNode, childNodes, tagName and attributes. It also provides a value for text nodes
A Javascript like DOM manipulation system, featuring such gems as appendChild, setAttribute, getAttribute, removeChild, getElementsByTagName, getElementsByName,getElementById, toXML and toFile, all of which (with the exception of the last two methods) behave almost exactly like their Javascript counterparts.
An XMLDocument class with html, head, title and body (nothing special, but it makes life easier)
An XMLParser class that turns an XML string into a XMLElement tree.

You can find the source, along with some more notes here. Oh, and it's GPL too.

Labels: ajax, browsers, php