This paper describes how to use conventional compiler construction tools, and
parser generators in particular, to build XML driven application generators.
In our approach, the document interface is provided by a standard
stream-oriented XML processing framework (e.g., SAX or StAX). This framework
is used to program a generic, customizable XML scanner that transforms
documents into streams of suitable tokens (opening and closing tags,
character data, etc.). The next step is to characterize the syntactic
structure of these streams in terms of generation-specific context-free
grammars. By adding suitable semantic attributes and semantic actions to
these grammars, developers obtain generation-oriented translation schemes:
high-level specifications of the generation tasks. These specifications are
then turned into working application generators by using standard parser
generation technology. We illustrate the approach with <e-Subway>, an
XML-driven generator of shortest-route search applications in subway
networks.
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