Update & Documentation Submitted

[Week 31]

These past two weeks I've been very busy with the project and finishing off continuous assessment projects.

I started by looking at my method for generating the JTree. While taking Martin's comments on board I came up with a new method for constructing the tree correctly. This was great as I could then produce correct XPath expressions.

I moved onto to integrating Martin's code for querying. I learned about the SQL packages and classes that come with Java. More specifically which object to instantiate for passing an SQL statement, sending that to the database and collecting the results. This works well now and was a big milestone as I had then achieved all basic functionality with the project.

The meeting with Mark on Thursday was good as he gave some good suggestions on how to improve on what I had done. They were:
- Show before and after times (how my querying performs over eXist)
- Introduce the ability to specify a predicate on a node
- Introduce support for more datasets

I have managed to get basic predicates working. So a user may select a node, e.g. name and actually specify a name.

Martin provided me with lots more datasets. All XML files so I needed to write the schemas for these. I managed to complete this today. I may need to look into support attributes.

Submitted my Technical Specification, User Manual and Sample Code on Friday so good to get all that out of the way. I forgot to attach a print out of this blog, hopefully that will not be a problem. I'll contact GK tomorrow.

That's about it for now. It's time to focus on exams!

Hello to XSOM, bye to Apache XML Schema

[Week 27]

I got a recommendation from a classmate to use XML Schema Object Model (XSOM) for the XML Schema parsing. I've looked into this and I'm glad to say after a few hours of studying the schema and search mailing list archives I'm managing to extract information from files.

I've am now moving on to try and build the tree to visually represent the XML schema.
I had a meeting with MOC on Thursday discussing the general progress of the project and the fact that I'm behind schedule. He encouraged me to continue working on getting the tree built so that a user may then build XPath expressions using my GUI. Once I have this working he suggested that we arrange another meeting to plan the next steps.

This sounds promising so hopefully I can get a fairly generic parsing process in place and the tree working soon.

Commons XML Schema Model

[Week 21]

Commons XML Schema model is a general purpose schema model that can be used when a Java object tree representation of an Xml schema is required. -http://bit.ly/SUxXC

I found this API for processing XML schemas. It sounds like it will be perfect for my needs. Quite busy with continuous assessment projects at the moment. I will continue experimenting with this API as time allows and post back on project updates as soon as possible.

Adobe AIR / Flex

[Week 16]

Been playing around with Adobe AIR and Flex the past week. I'm trying to find effective GUI libraries for the project. Flex is very nice and quite powerful. As with all new things there is a little learning curve though! I'm still getting used to the components. I have learned that it may not be possible to integrate an Adobe AIR application with Java unless I used web services, ie. JSPs, tomcat server etc. 

Therefore this week I'll start researching Swing/AWT libraries for this project. They might not be as easy on the eyes but may be better to stay in familiar ground for now until I get the basics working.