Open AccessStatic Analysis of XML Transformations in Java
Author(s) -
Christian Kirkegaard,
Anders Møller,
Michael I. Schwartzbach
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
brics report series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1601-5355
pISSN - 0909-0878
DOI - 10.7146/brics.v10i19.21789
Subject(s) - computer science , programming language , xpath , xml validation , simple api for xml , xml schema (w3c) , streaming xml , xml , java , document type definition , document structure description , theoretical computer science , xml signature , operating system
XML documents generated dynamically by programs are typically represented as text strings or DOM trees. This is a low-level approach for several reasons: 1) Traversing and modifying such structures can be tedious and error prone; 2) Although schema languages, e.g. DTD, allow classes of XML documents to be defined, there are generally no automatic mechanisms for statically checking that a program transforms from one class to another as intended. We introduce X ACT , a high-level approach for Java using XML templates as a first-class data type with operations for manipulating XML values based on XPath. In addition to an efficient runtime representation, the data type permits static type checking using DTD schemas as types. By specifying schemas for the input and output of a program, our algorithm will statically verify that valid input data is always transformed into valid output data and that no errors occur during processing.