A Generative Approach to the Construction of Application-Specific XML Processing Components

This paper proposes a generative approach to the construction of XML processing components. This approach promotes the high-level description of XML processing tasks with attribute grammars (a high-level formalism used in the definition of computer languages). The components themselves are produced by automatically processing these high-level specifications with a suitable generator. The approach substantially enhances the construction and maintenance of task-specific XML processing components compared to hand-coding or more rigid generative solutions. In order to illustrate the approach, we will show how XLOP (XML Language-Oriented Processing), an XML processing environment based on these concepts, is used for the development of an XML-based courseware system in the e-Learning domain.