Type-specific class generation using XML parsers

[Paul Pazandak]

I have finished modifications to an XML parser to support type-specific
class tree generation, as opposed to generic tree objects. This means,
for example, that the parser would generate a complex object of the
form:

BOOK (using book.java)
 - CHAPTER (using chap.java)
    - SECTION (using sect.java)
etc.

for an xml document describing a book. The resulting tree is useable
immediately without further parsing or traversing of the tree, which
would be generally required if the tree was composed of generic XML
objects. The class specifications are embedded in the accompanying
DTD (which are then consumed by the parser), but could as easily be
embedded in the xml document itself.

My question is what, if any, effort is there to standardize how
class-related metadata is defined within a DTD or XML specification?
I'd prefer to adopt an approach that is likely to be standardized.
In addition, what other approaches (excluding hard-coding classnames)
have been proposed to produce the same result as I have described?

Regards,

Paul.

p.s. This all came about because event-based parsing seems like quite
a pain. In addition, any changes to the XML structure can require many
changes to the event-handling code. Further, the generation of generic
tree structures is not very useful because one must traverse the tree
and basically parse (again!) the tree to generate application-specific
structures. So, why not have the correct structure be generated the
first time by the parser?

--

********************************************************************
Paul Pazandak, Ph.D                                pazandak at objs.com
Object Services and Consulting, Inc.             http://www.objs.com
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55420-5409                       612-881-6498
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