XMLtp: Introduction
  XMLtp  

A tiny XML parser/processor in Java
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General

   XMLtp is a tiny XML parse/processor written in Java. Its main purpose is to server inside applications who wish to use XML as their storage format for the application's data. Since writing XML is not too difficult, reading XML requires a little bit more effort. XMLtp is here to reduce this effort.

XMLtp deals with a sub-set of well-formed XML, but is not a verifying processor. "Well-formed" and "verifying" are terms from the XML specification. "Well-formed" XML means that the syntay of an XML document adhears to the specification. "Verified" means the semantic of an XML document is checked against a document type definition (DTD). XMLtp does not deal with DTDs. Consequently, it doesn't understand the corresponding DTD declaration semantics from the XML specification.

Frankly said, there is litte use for a DTD when XML is just used by an application as its internal data storage format. The application has to understand and verify the semantical correctness of its application data anyhow, and in a much stricter sense than it can be defined in a DTD. Therefore XMLtp provides the syntactical handling for reading XML, but relies on the application programmer to provide the semantic check of the correct data.

In case verification is needed, there are a load of larger XML processors out there, e.g. implementations of SAX (simple API for XML). The resource section of XML.ORG provides information about them. These processors are usually much larger than XMLtp. In fact, XMLtp was written to have a small parser, not a fully-featured one.
 

Conformance

   XMLtp does in no way claim to be XML specification conformant. It can't, since it doesn't handle DTDs and some other more excotic parts of XML. It is, however, more than good enough to support an application in using a sub-set of XML as its storrage format. XMLtp is in some areas also more strict than the simplified grammar given in Appendix F of the XML specification. For parsing XML XMLtp supports the following XML features:
  • Unicode support
  • Comments (they are ignored)
  • Processing instructions (they are also ignored)
  • Start-Tags, end-tags, and empty-element-tags
  • PCData, and of course elements as an element's content
  • Attributes in start-tags, and empty-element-tags
  • Character and entity references
  • Predefined entities, as well as application supplied ones

The parser fully intentionally violates the white-space handling policy of XML for the sanity of programmers' mental health. Not that anyone would need it for applications anyhow. (Correct me if I am wrong.)
 

Features

  
  • "Almost" XML
  • Small
  • Easy to handle
  • Free
  • Fun
  • Includes source code
  • Fast (for Java that is)
 

Detailed Description

   The API documentation contains a detailed description about how to install and program with the XMLtp API.
Copyright (C) 1999, 2001 Thomas Weidenfeller. All rights reserved.