6533b825fe1ef96bd1282873

RESEARCH PRODUCT

XA2C Framework for XML Alteration/Adaptation

subject

description

XML has crossed the borders of software engineering and has spread to other areas such as e-commerce, identification, information storage, instant messaging and others. It is used to communicate crucial data over these domains. Thus, allowing non-expert programmers to manipulate and control their XML data is essential. In the literature, this issue has been dealt with from 3 perspectives: (i) XML alteration/adaptation techniques requiring a certain level of expertise to be implemented and are not unified yet, (ii) mashups, which are not formally defined yet and are not specific to XML data, and (iii) XML-oriented visual languages based on structural transformations and data extraction mainly and not allowing XML textual data manipulations. In this paper, we discuss existing approaches and present our XA2C framework intended for both non-expert and expert programmers able to provide them with means to write/draw their XML data manipulation operations. The framework is designed in the combined spirits of both mashups and XMLoriented visual languages by defining a well-founded modular architecture similar to mashups and an XML-oriented visual functional composition language based on colored petri nets. The framework takes advantage of existing XML alteration/adaptation techniques by defining them as XML-oriented manipulation functions. A prototype called XA2C is developed and presented here with the set of tests conducted to validate our approach.