Introducing DAX: Declarative API for XML

Inspired by XSLTO, I’ve put together a bit of code to allow XSLT like tranformations from within Java. DAX glues together Java 5 annotations, Jaxen XPath and DOM4J to make possible the declarative style of processing shown below.

Getting Started

• Install JDK 5 and a recent flavor of Ant
• Download DAX here
• Extract and do an “ant test”
• “ant javadocs” for API guide
• Look at the dax.examples package for sample code

More postings to follow. Stay tuned…

public class BindingTransform extends Transformer {

	public List items = new ArrayList();
	private RSSItem currentItem;

	public BindingTransform() {
		// tell engine about anticipated namespace
		setNamespace("dc", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/");
	}

	public void init() {
		items.clear();
	}

	public void complete() {
		for (RSSItem i : items) {
			System.out.println(i.getTitle());
		}
	}

	@Path("//item")
	public void item(Node node) {
		currentItem = new RSSItem();
		items.add(currentItem);
		applyTemplates(node);
	}

	@Path("item/title")
		public void title(Node node) {
		currentItem.setTitle(node.getStringValue());
	}

	@Path("item/link")
		public void link(Node node) {
		currentItem.setLink(node.getStringValue());
	}

	@Path("item/description")
		public void description(Node node) {
		currentItem.setDescription(node.getStringValue());
	}

	@Path("item/dc:creator")
		public void creator(Node node) {
		currentItem.setCreator(node.getStringValue());
	}
}