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CadSoft EAGLE development team developing XML format for schematic, layout and parts libraries!

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hello makers -

 

this is my first post here, i'm the senior editor at MAKE magazine and also the creative director at adafruit. i've been part of a growing movement called "open-source hardware" for the last 5 years or so. today we just got some great news from the CadSoft EAGLE development team about the their long term commitment to text based file formats in the world of electronics development. with their permission i am posting this here and on MAKE (as well as adafruit). it's extremely exciting for those of us who wanted an XML format for files and we're thrilled CadSoft EAGLE has said they're committed to it!

 

here's the overview of what we learned:

 

  • CadSoft EAGLE (our preferred schematic/layout software) has told us they are committed to a text based format in the long term.
  • The CadSoft EAGLE development team is developing a new format for schematic, layout and parts libraries that is XML, this means every object and line will be written out in text description.
  • You won't have to worry about binary file corruption, you will be able to hand-edit or generate schematics and layouts and of course the magic of version-control (such as github) will be easier than ever with real text 'diff's!
  • This will be a fully documented format and also of course a converter for old CadSoft EAGLE binary-type formats.

 

 

this is a great direction and i encourage you to support EAGLE as you decide which tools to use now and in the future. but that's not all, i've chatted with the element-14 folks and they're all set up for your feedback, if they're very interested in Maker voices their product development. so here's your chance folks!

 

cheers,

pt

Parents Reply Children
  • in reply to fustini

    Jorge of CadSoft shows off a preview of the XML format over in this thread:

     

    http://www.element14.com/community/message/37077

  • in reply to fustini

    I'm really happy to see the EAGLE team adding XML support.  Any kind of native text support would be a big plus, but I've worked with XML a *lot* and there are some very powerful toolsets for working with it.

     

    That being said, a couple of things about this announcement worry me.  First is the use of the word "ASCII", which I'm just hoping is sloppy technical jargon for "text".  ASCII is a very limited character encoding that has been surpassed by UTF-8, which is able to represent characters like "é" and "€".  I'm also bothered by the lack of indenting in the screenshot above, as it doesn't show much attention to detail.  Neither of these are technical show-stoppers, however.

     

    What's most important is that a robust, stable, versioned XML schema is published, and that the tools that CadSoft provide for parsing and generating XML documents strictly adheres to it and provides meaningful errors when validation fails.  Do not fall into the trap of building a loosely-defined schema and then throwing errors in the program logic when the attribute you defined as an xsd:string isn't a valid floating-point number.  A good schema will allow you to use tools like xmllint to make sure the XML you're generating from gEDA or Kicad (or from the bash script you wrote for generating your schematics before GUI tools became cool) is valid and stands a solid chance of being usable by EAGLE.

     

    Thanks for listening!

    Brian