The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a large suite of standards for describing the format and meaning of data to support the computerized access to its information. XML is a subset of SGML. Its goal is to enable documents to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.
The coursework for CSE-131A will use XML extensively. This XML Quick Intro may help get you started. For more detailed information see the W3C XML documentation or Coverpages XML Documentation
Sources of XML. Browse some sample XML files.
Onyx is the XQuery subset we will use in CSE 131A. A working scanner, parser, and interpreter will be made available later in the course via a web interface. Onyx differs from W3C XQuery in various ways, but provides a useful subset of functionality that will enable us to implement interesting XML queries. The complete specification is found HERE
The onyx_xml library may be used to create OXML documents in memory, to output them to a file, and also to read a compliant OXML document into memory. From ACS machines, it is pre-installed in the CSE 131A Tools directory: ~cs131w/../public/Tools/onyx_xml.jar. Documentation is found here.
Sun makes much of its Java 2
SE documentation available on-line. This is valuable development aid.
If you are new to Java 1.5, here is a document describing the differences
between versions 1.4 and 1.5.
Here is a writeup describing how to use
Java Exceptions and here is some documentation on JUnit, Testing resource for Extreme Programming,
and the
JUnit Cookbook
xmldiff & xmlpp
Xmlpp is an XML "pretty-printer" that formats XML files in a readable way; xmldiff is a tool that shows you the differences between two XML files. These tools are portable and written in Perl, They are available in the CSE 131A environment. Run xmlpp -h and xmldiff -h for documentation. A useful option is the -ns option, which avoids output where there are no differences (otherwise idential text appears in pale color.)
The tools licensed under a BSD-style license, and are available from DecisionSoft :
Download xmlpp
Download xmldiff
The coursework for CSE-131A is based on the 1.4.1 release of JFlex. JFlex is a Java-based scanner generator tool. It generates high-quality scanners from an input grammar of regular expressions. From ACS machines, it is pre-installed in the CSE 131A “~cs131w/public/Tools/JFlex” directory. JFlex is free software, released under the GPL, and available for free download. Students can also obtain the distribution files directly from the vendor at www.jflex.de
JFlex is designed to work together with the LALR parser generator CUP by Scott Hudson, and the Java modification of Berkeley Yacc BYacc/J by Bob Jamison. It can also be used together with other parser generators like ANTLR or as a standalone tool. [from the JFlex web site]
CUP (Constructor of Useful Programs) is a Java-based LALR parser generator. CUP is similar to the traditional C-based YACC parser generator, but it produces its parsers in Java. The coursework for CSE-131A is based on the CUP version 11 release from Technical University of Munich. From ACS machines, it is pre-installed as a jar file in the CSE 131A Tools directory: ~cs131w/public/Tools/java-cup-v11a.jar. CUP is free software, released under the GPL, and available for free download. Students can also obtain the distribution files directly from the support site: http://www2.cs.tum.edu/projects/cup/.