Everything in these pages (apart from 3d party libraries) and any downloadable software is copyrighted material: Copyright (C): Michael Pediaditakis, David Shrimpton, University of Kent, 2001,2002,2003. Currently, all the information are provided for testing purposes only and any form of distribution is prohibited (eventually there will probably be an open source LGPL-like release). THERE IS NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. Use the software at your own risk.
In other words: feel free to download, try and experiment with the code and the theory but, please, do not distrubute any of those yet! Any suggestions will be highly appreciated.
XMLPipe is a model for applying transformations to XML content in way that allows heterogeneous document processing in a device neutral manner. The basic XMLPipe features are:
The latest XMLPipe binary distribution is XMLPipe0.1.9a_build738_10_March_04.tar.gz, and the latest jar (included in the distribution) is XMLPipe0.1.9a_build738_10_March_04.jar The binary distribution contains the compiled code, the jar, the documents (including this page), the javadoc and basically everything that is needed to run and learn how to use XMLPipe.
Running XMLPipe is simply a matter of including the appropriate libraries to your Java class path and executing the XMLPipe command line utility. Firstly, download and unpack the XMLPipe distribution and make sure that you include the dist/XMLPipe.jar in your Java classpath. Also ensure that you have a recent Java version (Sun's JDK 1.4 or equivalent is required for the current build). XMLPipe uses Apache Xerces for XML processing and Apache Xalan for XSL-T processing. Currently, there are implementation dependencies and only these XML and XSL processing libraries can be used.
This initial distribution contains all the required libraries in under the "lib" directory, and thus you don't have to download them separately. If the XMLPipe.jar and all other jar files contained in the lib/ directory are included in the classpath everything should be ok! (you only need "junit.jar" for running the tests during XMLPipe compilation)
Then, try the following:
java XMLPipeCmd -hIf you get the XMLPipe command line help, then XMLPipe is called properly. In order to propetly use XMLPipe, it has to know the installation directory (so that it can find XMLPipe related schemas etc) and all the associated libraries must be available and running properly. A good first step is to create the file
.xmlPipePathin your home directory that contains the path to the XMLPipe installation. Then use the syntax:
java XMLPipeCmd --checkthat checks if the libaries are there and if it can find all the required XMLPipe components. A final test would be to CWD to samples/tutorial/helloXSLT and run the example as follows:
java XMLPipeCmd -qc configCustom.xml desktop helloCustom.xmlIf (after a while) some XML is produced and you don't get any exceptions, XMLPipe should be working properly.
XMLPipe is quite a complex architecture and learning how to use it requires some studying (you really have to read the manual, otherwise you will not be able to do anything). I would suggest to first check the command line syntax the get an idea on the usage of the command line tool using the:
java XMLPipeCmd -hMost of the information should not make any sense at this point which is reasonable.
Then proceed to the userGuide which provides an example based introduction to XMLPipe. I would suggest to actually try the examples and make sure you understand something before moving on since each of them builds on top of the previous ones
When you feel confident with all the information in the user guide you can also check the javaDoc which has more information on the individual XMLPipe components.
Shortly, there will be more documentation:
....future document 8^)
| Last update: 8 April 2003 | Mail to mp49@ukc.ac.uk |