JvYAML and RbYAML - what's to come?

I know I've posted about the next release of JvYAML a few times, but going has gotten tough, since there are so many interesting projects to work at. Anyway, I was thinking that I would blog a bit again, since a significant new feature has reared it's head. It's about YAML 1.0 compatibility. This needs to be added to both JvYAML and RbYAML in fact. The reason is a recent incident where YAML communication between JRuby and Ruby broke in a slightly embarrassing way. Most of you probably know which incident I'm talking about.

The problem is very simple. YAML 1.1 is _almost_ backwards compatible to 1.0, with the exception for a few points. The point that broke is the shorthand tags from the YAML type repository. In YAML 1.0 you could prefix a value with !str and this means it shouldn't be interpolated as another type of value. A typical example (and actually the example that triggered the incident) is this:

version: !str 0.2

Now, in YAML 1.1, it doesn't look the same way. It was decided that a single exclamation point is actually shorthand for the user namespace, while a double exclamation point means the yaml.org:2002-namespace. So, the above example in YAML 1.1 is

version: !!str 0.2

This is a tiny change, but it breaks, since YAML 1.0 handles !!str as a private type, and YAML 1.1 handles !str as a private type. Not a really nice situation.

The solution in my case will be to add a flag for RbYAML and JvYAML that specifies that you want 1.0-compatibility. When that flag is turned on, some of these issues will be handled correctly by the parser, and emitted in a way an 1.0 parser could read. This will be the only change in RbYAML. But JvYAML will contain (as detailed before) an emitter, JavaBean materialization and many bug fixes.