xml2pm: a tool for automatic creation of object

Abstract

The eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is probably one of the most popular markup languages available today. It is very typical to find all kind of services or programs representing data in this format. This situation is even more common in web development environments or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), where data flows from one service to another, being consumed and produced by an heterogeneous set of applications, which sole requirement is to understand XML. This workflow of data represented in XML implies some tasks that applications have to perform if they are required to consume or produce information: the task of parsing an XML document, giving specific semantics to the information parsed, and the task of producing an XML document. Our main goal is to create object definitions that can analyze an XML document and automatically create an object definition that can be used abstractly by the application. These objects are able to parse the XML document and gather all the data required to mimic all the information present in the document. This paper introduces xml2pm, a simple tool that can inspect the structure of an XML document and create an object definition (a Perl module) that stores the same information present in the orinial document, but as a runtime object. We also introduce a simple case of how this approach allows the creation of applications based on Web Services in an elegant and simple way.