Roy's Technology Diary

The Simple XML serialization framework has released version 1.2. Simple is a serialization framework for Java that intends to provide an XML serialization framework that requires no configuration or mappings to serialize objects bi-directionally; i.e. to and from standard XML. Below is a list of some of the capabilities of the framework. Simple framework with powerful capabilities The framework used to provide XML serialization is simple to use and revolves around several annotations an a single persister object used to read and write objects to and from XML. Both serialization and deserialization are fully supported. It requires absolutely no configuration Unlike many of the XML frameworks for Java there are no mappings or configuration required to serialize objects regardless of its complexity, not even code to establish mappings. Everything is done at runtime, only annotations are required to perform the object to XML structure. The XML schema is represented using field and method a...

Whilst developing web applications, more than often we are confronted with the need to validate user inputs. On the client-side (browsers) we generally do that with scripting languages; and for those users who have perhaps deliberately disabled their browser script support; we perform the same set validation on the server side, and this time we write some lines-of-code to extract the user input from the HTTP request and validate the same. Well, although ironic; yet it seems to be a de-facto that - we have to specify the validation rules separately on the client and server side, for eventually validating something that is semantically same. A technical analysis into the core reason reveals that – although the semantics of the herein discussed "thing" (i.e. the user input) are the same, yet the representations of the semantic on the client and server side are different; which enforces us to implement the extraction and validation logic differently. So going by that theory - if ...

Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about patterns found in XML documents. It is a simple language which is based very much on XML itself and uses standard XPath to specify the assertion statements. The Schematron definations (a.k.a Schema) can be processed with standard XSL templates; which makes Schematron applicable is a variety of scenarios. Although a Schematron defination is referred as a Schema, but one must understand that Schematron differs in the basic concept from other schema languages; i.e. it is not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document. This approach allows many kinds of structures to be represented which could be difficult with grammar-based schema languages. For instance - imagine how would a typical schema be, for the following XML document - <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <instance> #### <person> ######## <fname/> ######## <lname/> #### </pers...