Contents - Cultural View

CookXml 107
Creators, setters, adders, and converters together form a tag library which is used by the CookXml engine to perform
the XML data binding.
Dynamic Tag Library Construction
Because CookXml tag library uses delegates, its tag library needs to be dynamically constructed. This feature is both
good and bad. It is bad because there will be a slight initiation cost when the tag library is constructed, and its
integrity may not be verified until runtime. It is also good because it allows developers to easily extend an existing
tag library at run time.
Preorder and Postorder Addition
Like any trees that can be traversed in preorder and postorder, the object corresponding to an XML element can be
added to the parent object in preorder or postorder. In the preorder addition, the object is added to the parent before
descendant XML elements get processed. In the postorder addition, the object is added to the parent after descendant
XML elements get processed.
XML Tag Inheritance
One discovery made while writing CookXml was that class inheritance of Object-oriented languages can be mirrored
into XML element tag inheritance. Semantically, tag inheritance means that the derived tag will inherit the setters
and adders of the inherited tags.
For example, javax.swing.JMenu is a child class of javax.swing.JMenuItem. Assuming that javax.swing.JMenu is
mapped to tag and javax.swing.JMenuItem is mapped to tag, then we can declare in CookXml
that tag inherits tag. tag then inherts the setters for attributes such as "text" and "icon"
of the tag.
Polymorphisms of OOP can be mirrored in XML tag inheritance as well. Class casting is similar to dynamically
renaming the current namespace and the tag of the element being processed.
XML tag inheritance is a methodology not present in any other XML data binding tools. This feature is immensely
useful in mapping XML documents to classes with deep inheritance hierarchy, typically found in GUI API. Thus
CookXml is useful in writing XUL motors. CookSwing and CookSwt are two such examples for mapping XML
documents to Swing and SWT classes.
Namespace Handling
Since version 3.0, CookXml is capable of dealing XML documents with multiple namespaces. For backward
compatibility, CookXml also parse XML documents without namespaces or partially utilizing namespaces.
Other Implementation Details
As of version 3.0, CookXml operates on top of XML DOM tree to map an XML document to objects. This feature
allows developers to utilize XML schema if such exist to verify the incoming XML documents. On the other hand,
the memory consumption for a large XML document can be problematic.