XML Viewer for Java - README

Overview
System Requirements
Installation Instructions
Glossary of Terms

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Overview

XML or eXtensible Markup Language is a meta-language used to define other markup languages for structured documents.

Structured documents are those that contain content stored hierarchically, in a specified format. Markup languages can be used to identify the document structures. The common markup languages currently in use are:

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) - a standard system for defining and using document formats.
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) - a language used for hypertext linking, multimedia and displaying of simple documents on the Web.

XML, apart from being a meta-language, is considered a markup language. XML is a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). In XML, you can easily define custom document structures via Document Type Definition (DTD) unlike HTML, where the structure is fixed. With this facility, the information retrieval rate is very high. You can perform any kind of advanced searches on a document and retrieve appropriate information.

XML Viewer for Java is a Java application that displays any well-formed XML document. You can traverse the document's hierarchy using the tree views, find out the attributes of a particular node in the hierarchy and view the source of the XML and associated DTD files. You can also view the source of a selected node in the XML source view and the definition of the node in the DTD source view.

Note: This document assumes that you have prior knowledge of XML. For more information on XML, refer to site http://www.w3.org/XML/. Please refer to the Glossary for information on technical terms used in this document.

System Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Approximately 850 KB of disk space is required to install the xml.jar file and 462 KB to install the xml4j.jar parser.

Software Requirements

XML Viewer for Java is designed to work with Java Development Kit Version 1.1.5 and above.

You need to install JFC 1.1(Swing 1.0) (package name: com.sun.java.swing.*) on your machine. Make sure that swingall.jar is in the CLASSPATH.

Note: Although the application runs in JDK 1.2, changes in the Look & Feel do not take effect due to the differences in the swing versions.

Installation Instructions

After downloading xmlviewer.zip, unzip it using the jar command or any unzip utility. It will automatically create a new directory called xmlviewer and extract files into it.

To run the XML viewer application, type

 java runviewer

in the command prompt (shell) in the demo directory.

Glossary of Terms

A | C | D | E | H | P | S | U | V | W | X

A
Attributes	Variable specified in the start tag of the element identified by a name-value pair.
AWT	Abstract Window Toolkit, a cross-platform UI framework developed for Java.
C
Comment	A node in the XML/DTD document identified with a structure. `<!---comment text--!>`
Content	Data between the start-tag and the end-tag.
CDATA	Character data that exist in an XML document within CDATA sections. E.g. `<!CDATA[character data...]>`
D
DOM	The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The document can be further processed and the results of that processing can be incorporated back into the presented page. The Document Object Model (DOM) provides a common API for software developers and web script authors to access and manipulate parsed HTML and XML content inside conforming products. All markups as well as any document type declarations are made available. (This text is taken from the DOM Working Draft)
DTD	Document Type Definition, defines the tags and the grammar for an XML Document.
E
Element	Part of an XML Document identified by a start tag.
Empty Element	Element without an end-tag. (See element)
H
HTML	Hyper Text Markup Language, the de facto language for the web to display hyper-linked documents.
L
Look-And-Feel	Refers to the Graphic User Interface.
M
Mark-up	Tags in XML file which could be elements, comments, processing instructions etc.
P
PCData	Content represented by text. (See content)
PI	See Processing Instruction.
Processing Instruction	Markup in an XML document identified by a name and a value. E.g. `<?author xyz?>`, where author is the target and xyz is the value.
S
SGML	Standard Generalized Markup Language, the international standard for describing descriptions of the structure and content of different types of electronic documents.
Swing	A lightweight UI framework for Java used as an alternative to AWT.
Symbol	Special tokens appearing in the XML document e.g. <, >, !, [, ], ?, =, ".
U
URL	Uniform Resource Locator , method for specifying a file by its protocol, location and name
V
Valid XML	An XML Document which is well formed and conforms to a specified Document Type Definition. (See Well formed XML)
W
Well-formed XML	An XML Document that is syntactically correct. (See XML)
X
XML	The eXtensible Markup Language is designed to provide an easy-to-write, easy-to-interpret, and easy-to-implement subset of SGML. It is not a fixed format like HTML, it is designed so that certain groups can create their own particular markup languages that meet their needs more quickly, efficiently and logically.
xml4j	A validating XML parser developed by IBM.