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Article #509: SPTK 3.0

Created at 06:40 Sep 25, 2005 by alexey.parshin

The massive SPTK CVS update is just completed. The building system is replaced by autoconf/automake based. So, the following changes are made:

• Include files now reside in sptk3/ (not in sptk/). That should allow to install both SPTK versions, 2.x and 3.x, simultaneously.
• All the SPTK libraries now have the major version number 3 (not 2) : libsptk3.so, libspdb3.so, etc..
• Configure script (.configure) now includes --enable-examples switch to enable building examples. However, even if you pass the switch, examples aren't automatically built - you have to go to examples/ directory, and run make separately.

In the source code, there are 3 sets of changes. If used correctly, these changes allow you to simplify your code and make it work faster.

• In the XML module, the method CXmlDoc::createElement() and similar are no longer public. Instead, <sptk3/xml/CXmlNode.h> gives you several simple classes that allow to create XML object.

  Old style code <br />

      CXmlDoc *doc = parentNode->document();
      CXmlNode *node = doc->createElement("book");
      parentNode->add(node); 

  New style code

      CXmlNode *node = new CXmlElement(parentNode,"book"); 
  

  While the new form is obviously shorter, it also makes sure that the node is attached to the parentNode. Don't try to use NULL for the parentNode - it would cause GPF instantly :)
• The CXmlNode methods getAttribute() and setAttribute() got a new optional parameter, const char *defaultValue. If defined, it makes getAttribute() method return the value to if attribute is missing. For the setAttribute(), the defaultValue makes CXmlNode to remove the attribute. This way, if a lot of the attributes in XML file have the default values, the size of the file is drastically decreased.
• The CFieldList class got a support for the streamed output for most used SPTK classes. The following example illustrates it:<br />

        int id;
        std::string name;
        CDateTime birthDate;
        CQuery query(db,"select id,name,dob from people");
        query.open();
        while (!query.eof()) {
           query.fields() >> id >> name >> birthDate;
           query.next();
        }
        query.close();
  

• The CParams class got a support for the streamed input for most used SPTK classes. The following example illustrates it:<br />

        int id = 12345;
        std::string name = "Alex";
        CDateTime birthDate;
        CQuery query(db,"select id,name,dob from people where id > :id and name = :name");
        query.params() << id << name;
        query.open();
        ...
  

These changes would be available in the next version, SPTK 3.1, after about a week of testing. Feel free to drop me a line.

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