A Cocoa framework for working with XML-data. Like JDOM or XOM, but in Objective-C.

What is DOM?

DOM stands for Document Object Model and can be thought as a way of describing an XML-document in terms of a tree of objects. A document has nodes, which in turn contains other nodes, all represented by objects. For those of you who have programmed JavaScript, the document-object is a kind of DOM, representing all (well, almost), tags and other things on the web-page, in Mozilla and Safari this is actually true. DOM is a recommendation from W3C (www.w3c.org/DOM).

What is Iconara DOM?

Iconara DOM is a W3C DOM compliant framework for manipulating XML-data. It defines the core module, plus a basic implementation of the XPath module.

The framework was build with the same philosophy as JDOM and XOM: it's better to integrate the DOM model into the language, than than being 100% compliant. In my humble opinion, the W3C DOM-interfaces are ugly as hell. Especially if you apply them to Objective-C. This framework can do more or less everything that a DOM compliant framework can do, in a nice Objective-C way, not in the ugly IDL way.

The framework is licenced under the GNU GPL, with a special exception for Free and Open Source software that allows for linking the framework with non-GPL'ed code, as long as that code is licensed under a OSI-approved license (see the documentation for more info).

Why Iconara DOM?

The Document Object Model (the DOM, that is) is a nice interface to work with. It represents XML in a intuitive way, at least if you see XML as a tree-like structure with nodes of different types containing different kinds of data.

The framework was originally written in a time when there was no native Objective-C way of working with XML data in an object oriented manner. In Mac OS X 10.4 Apple introduced NSXML, but even that is not actually DOM compliant. For Java developers there are lots of frameworks available. For us Not so for us Cocoa developers. I wanted to fill a hole in Cocoa. The framework has not been in active development since 2005, but with the lack of a DOM framework on the iPhone it again has a hole to fill.

Installation

The framework is build to be embedded into applications, add it to your project and make sure that it is copied to the frameworks-directory inside the application bundle when the project is built. If you would like a framework that is built to be installed as a standalone framework, you can download the source and build it with the build style ”Deployment (standalone)”.

Documentation and downloads

The documentation and downloadable binaries are currently hosted on an old site: http://developer.iconara.net/products/DOM/index.html, in time they will likely move here.