Java course - XML, XSLT and XPath

Java course - IAG0040

Java and the Web:
XML, XSL, Servlets

Anton Keks 2011

Introduction to XML
●
XML = Extensible Markup Language
– recommended by W3C general-purpose markup language
– includes text and extra information (markup)
– “simplified SGML”
– meta-language, can be used to create new ones
●
XML has hit the “sweet spot” between simplicity and
flexibility
– very widely used for exchange of various data
– even HTML has been retrofitted as XHTML
– MathML, MusicXML, SVG, WSDL, RSS, OpenDocument, etc
Java course – IAG0040 Lecture 13
Anton Keks Slide 2

XML design goals
●
Human-readable
– human-readable and self-descriptive markup
– text files, supports Unicode
●
Easily machine-parseable
– strict structure, well-defined formal rules
– well-compressible for storage and transmission
– platform-independent
● Multi-purpose and extensible
– hierarchical structure: records, lists, trees
– schemas, namespaces
Anton Keks Slide 3

XML syntax
●
Single element
– <name attribute="value">content</name>
● Example document
– <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<recipe name="bread" prepTime="5 mins" cookTime="3 hours">
<title>Basic bread</title>
<ingredient amount="3" unit="cups">Flour</ingredient>
<ingredient amount="0.25" unit="ounce">Yeast</ingredient>
<ingredient amount="1.5" unit="cups" state="warm">Water</ingredient>
<ingredient amount="1" unit="teaspoon">Salt</ingredient>
<instructions>
<step>Mix all ingredients together, and knead thoroughly.</step>
<step>Cover with a cloth, and leave for one hour in warm room.</step>
<step>Knead again, place in a tin, and then bake in the oven.</step>
</instructions>
</recipe>

Anton Keks Slide 4

XML Structure
● XML Declaration (version, encoding, external dependencies)
– <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8"?>
● Document type definitions (DTD): <!DOCTYPE example [ ... ]>
● Single root element, nested elements, some with attributes and content
– <name attribute="value">content</name> or <foo/>
– starting and ending tag, content or nested elements between, no overlapping
– case-sensitive
● Special chars and entities
– predefined: & < > ' " &#DDD; &#xHH;
– more can be declared: <!ENTITY copy "©">
– unescaped data: <![CDATA[ A & B ]]>
● Comments: 
Anton Keks Slide 5

XML correctness
●
Well-formed
– conforms to all syntax rules
●
Valid (only if well-formed)
– data and structure conforms to a set of rules,
describing correct data values and locations
– must comply to a schema
– DTD – a part of XML spec
– More functional: XML Schema (XSD), RELAX NG

Anton Keks Slide 6

DTD example
● DTD = Document Type Definition
●
Declaration
– <!DOCTYPE customer [ element declarations here ]> - internal DTD
– <!DOCTYPE customer SYSTEM "customer.dtd"> - external DTD
– <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
● Content
– <!ELEMENT people_list (person*)>
<!ELEMENT person (name, birthdate?, gender?, personal_id?)>
<!ATTLIST person index CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT birthdate (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT gender (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT personal_id (#PCDATA)>

Anton Keks Slide 7

XML Namespaces
●
Help to avoid naming conflicts
●
Allow merging of XML documents with different semantics
●
Uses prefixes to distinguish namespaces
– <xhtml:table><xhtml:tr/></xhtml:table>
– prefix names are not fixed, defined in declaration
● xmlns:prefix=”namespaceURI”
● <h:table
xmlns:h=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/”>
– default namespace can be declared with xmlns alone
● <table xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/”>

Anton Keks Slide 8

XSD: W3C XML Schema
● XML-based
●
Has more features than DTD
● Namespaces are directly supported
●
Data model
– the vocabulary
● element and attribute names
– the content model
● relationships, structure, ordering
– the data types
● semantics and validation rules

Anton Keks Slide 9

XSD (cont)
● Schema example (country.xsd)
– <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:element name="country" type="countryType"/>
<xs:complexType name="countryType">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="name" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="population" type="xs:decimal"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:schema>
● Declaration (country.xml)
– <country xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="country.xsd">
<name>France</name><population>59.7</population>
</country>
– <c:country xmlns:c="http://java.azib.net/country"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.azib.net/country country.xsd">
</c:country>

Anton Keks Slide 10

Unit testing
●
XMLUnit is a 3rd party addition to JUnit
– was designed for JUnit 3.x, however perfectly usable
with JUnit 4
– provides XMLAssert class that can be statically
imported
● import static org.custommonkey.xmlunit.XMLAssert.*;
● assertXXX() methods take XML as String or Document
– simplifies code testing that works with XML
● XML equality and similarity checking
● Validation
● XPath evaluation and checking
● Transformation
Anton Keks Slide 11

XPath
● XPath is a language for finding information in an XML document
– uses path expressions to select nodes (elements, attributes)
– has a library of built-in functions
– XML documents are treated as trees of nodes
● Sample XPath expressions
– /bookstore/book – all book elements under bookstore
– //book – all book elements in the document
– @lang – the value of lang attribute of current element
– bookstore/book[price > 35.00] – all books costing more than 35
– //book[@lang='en'] – all books in English
– book[1]/author[1]/name – first author of the first book
– book[last() - 1] – the book before the last one

Anton Keks Slide 12

Introduction to XSL
●
Meaning of arbitrary XML tags is not well understood by
e.g. a web browser
●
XSL describes how the XML document should be displayed
●
XSL = Extensible Stylesheet Language
– XML based, again
●
XSLT = XSL Transformations
– can be used to transform one XML format to another
XML or other text format (very often HTML or XHTML)
●
XSL-FO – a language for formatting XML documents (to
produce, e.g. PDF documents, images, graphics, etc)

Anton Keks Slide 13

XSLT basics
● Assigning stylesheets
– <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="file.xsl"?>
● XSL stylesheet
– <xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0”
xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
– then, one or more templates are defined
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<contents><xsl:copy-of select=”.”/></contents>
</xsl:template>
– Various xsl elements are used for querying of data using XPath
● all match, select, and test attributes take XPath expressions
● in other attributes, you can put XPath into {}
– Most used elements: copy-of, value-of, for-each, sort,
if, choose, apply-templates, call-template
Anton Keks Slide 14

XML Parsing
● There are 3 different ways to work with XML
– DOM = Document Object Model
● stores the full XML tree in memory as objects
● convenient to work with, but not suitable for very large XMLs
– SAX = Streaming API for XML
● reads (streams) XML data and produces events
● no access to the full document, state must be maintained manually
● no limits on XML size, generally faster
– XPP, XML Pull Parser (SAX is a 'push' parser)
● non-standard, not bundled with Java
● does not produce events, but rather waits for the client program to
'pull' information about parsing, then continues processing
Anton Keks Slide 15

Introduction to JAXP
●
JAXP = Java API for XML Processing
– javax.xml.parsers
● DocumentBuilder – DOM, SAXParser – SAX
– javax.xml.xpath
● XPath – compilation and evaluation of XPath expressions
– javax.xml.transform
●
Transformer – XSLT
– JAXP defines only interfaces, implementations are pluggable
● access to the implementations is via Factories
– DocumentBuilderFactory, SAXParserFactory, etc
● Java 1.6 bundles Apache Xerces and Xalan
Anton Keks Slide 16

JAXP overview
●
Other parts of the API are in packages,
according to standards that define them
– DOM is in org.w3c.dom
● Document, Node, Element, Attr, etc interfaces for
storing of DOM trees
– SAX is in org.xml.sax
●
XMLReader, ContentHandler interfaces for
handling/producing of SAX events

Anton Keks Slide 17

JAXP and DOM
●
javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory - creates DocumentBuilder
instances. Used to set various attributes for the parser, including its
validating behavior.
● javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder - performs parsing and creates DOM
Documents representing parsed XML
● org.w3c.dom.Document - represents the root of the XML DOM tree. An
element that contains the elements of the document.
● org.w3c.dom.Node - a single node in the document tree. A node can be
an element, an attribute, an entity, a document, or a text node.
●
org.w3c.dom.NodeList - an ordered enumeration of nodes
● org.w3c.dom.Element - a Node representing an XML element
● org.w3c.dom.Attr - an attribute attached to an Element
● org.w3c.dom.Text - a text Node (content of an element), CharacterData
Anton Keks Slide 18

JAXP and SAX
●
org.xml.sax.SAXParserFactory - creates SAXParser instances. Allows
various parameters to be set for the creation of the parser.
● javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser - used to initiate parsing of XML documents.
Encapsulates an XMLReader for generation of SAX events.
● org.xml.sax.XMLReader - used to register event handlers. Calls the
callback methods as content being scanned (generates SAX events)
● org.xml.sax.ContentHandler - the interface to implement in order to
receive SAX events. Instance must be registered with XMLReader.
● org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler – the interface to implement in order to handle
parsing errors.
● org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler - default implementation of
ContentHandler, ErrorHandler and a couple of other interfaces; can be
extended to simplify SAX event handling.

Anton Keks Slide 19

JAXP and XSL
●
javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory - creates Transformer
instances, either simple, that just copies source to the result, or with an
associated stylesheet that does the actual transformation
● javax.xml.transform.Transformer - represents the transformation rules
(stylesheet); used to transform the source XML and write the result
● javax.xml.transform.Source - interface for sources of transformation.
Used to provide both the stylesheet and the XML to the Transformer.
– Implementations: DOMSource, SAXSource, StreamSource, etc
● javax.xml.transform.Result - interface for writing of transformation
result.
– Implementations: DOMResult, SAXResult, StreamResult, etc
● javax.xml.transform.ErrorListener – interface for customized error
handling

Anton Keks Slide 20

JAXP and XPath
●
javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory - creates XPath instances and can be used
to define custom XPathFunctionResolver and XPathVariableResolver
● javax.xml.xpath.XPath - XPath evaluation environment. Used to compile
and evaluate XPath expressions. Evaluation takes the context node as a
parameter to evaluate the expression on.
● javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression - compiled XPath expression, used
directly for multiple evaluations of same expressions.
● javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants - a mapping between XPath and Java
data types

Anton Keks Slide 21

JAXB
●
JAXB = Java API for XML Binding
– XML serialization of Java objects
– javax.xml.bind
– Involves generation of Java classes according to
the XML schema or vice-versa
– JAXBContext is a factory for Marshaller and
Unmarshaller

Anton Keks Slide 22

JDOM & DOM4J
●
org.w3c.dom API was designed for any OO language and
was mapped to Java more or less directly
– the resulting API is not very convenient for Java
●
Two similar 3rd party DOM APIs address this
– JDOM is more lightweight and was proposed for
inclusion in Java SE
– DOM4J has integrated support for XPath, provides
better interoperability with W3C DOM and Transformer
– Most operations can be done using single method calls
– Java Strings and Collections are used

Anton Keks Slide 23

XML generation
●
There are many options:
– String concatenation
●
inflexible, can easily produce broken XML
– Programmatic creation of DOM tree
– Manual generation of SAX events
– JDOM/DOM4J
– XML marshalling using JAXB or similar API
– Template engines, e.g. StringTemplate, Velocity
● basically pre-created XML files with 'holes' that can be
filled with data
Anton Keks Slide 24

Servlets
● Servlets are server-side Java applications
● Now javax.servlet API is officially a part of Java EE
● They process asynchronous requests and generate responses
● Servlets are most often used in Web applications
● Servlets are deployed and run within containers (web
application servers)
– there are many commercial application servers
– Jetty and Tomcat are open-source ones
●
JSP (Java Server Pages) are PHP/ASP-like Java files with
embedded HTML, but they must be compiled into servlets
(usually on-the-fly)
Anton Keks Slide 25

Servlet API
●
A Servlet must implement javax.servlet.Servlet interface. However,
most servlets extend either javax.servlet.GenericServlet or
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.
● A container creates a single instance of the servlet class using the
default constructor, then it calls the init() method
● On every client request, the service() method is called
– for HTTP, there are various higher-level methods defined, e.g.
doGet(), doPost(), doPut(), doDelete(), etc
– these methods must be thread-safe because they are executed
concurrently. javax.servlet.SingleThreadModel interface can tell
the container not to do it.
– all these methods take HttpServletRequest and
HttpServletResponse as parameters

Anton Keks Slide 26

HttpServletRequest

● HttpServletRequest is for reading user's input
– getParameter() is for reading of HTTP request parameters
– getHeader() is for reading HTTP headers
– getCookies() is for examining the available cookies
– getSession() creates/obtains the HTTP session
– getReader() / getInputStream() are for reading of large request
payloads (e.g. uploaded files)
– getLocalXXX() / getServerXXX() return various info about the host,
where servlet is running and the server itself
– getRemoteXXX() returns various info on the remote client
– various other methods provide even more information

Anton Keks Slide 27

HttpServletResponse
● HttpServletResponse is for generating the response to the user
– addCookie() adds a cookie to the response
– addHeader() adds an arbitrary HTTP header to the response
– getWriter() / getOutputStream() provide a stream for writing of
response content, not further header modifications are possible if
isCommitted() returns true
– sendError() / setStatus() is for setting response status codes
– setContentLength() sets the size in bytes of outputted content
– setContentType() sets the MIME type of outputted content
(text/html for HTML content)
– There are a lot of SC_XXX status code constants defined
– There are many other useful methods

Anton Keks Slide 28

Sessions
● Sessions are used to persist some information (state) about the client
between asynchronous requests
● Provided by HttpSession interface
– request.getSession() returns an instance
– session attributes are any Objects with String keys, they are persisted
until session is either invalidate()'d or expired (after 30 min by
default)
● Servlet container uses either cookies or URL-rewriting to pass/retrieve
the session ID
– response.encodeURL() must be used with any output URLs for
URL-rewriting to work, in case cookies are not available
– these URLs typically look like this:
http://host/servlet;jsessionid=72183CAFE23?abc=hello
Anton Keks Slide 29

Servlet Filters
● Filters can be used to pre- or post-process requests
– Called in chain, one after another before the servlet, like
decorator pattern
– Can be used for access control, logging, context
initialization, compression, etc
● Need to implement javax.servlet.Filter
– Method doFilter(request, response, chain)
– To delegate processing further down the chain (optional), call
chain.doFilter(request, response)
– Or requests can be processed directly just like in a servlet

Anton Keks Slide 30

Deployment
● Web applications typically have defined directory structure
– The root of the application is the document root, e.g. where
images and other static content is located
– There is a WEB-INF directory. Files contained there are hidden
from direct access
● web.xml – deployment descriptor, defines URL-
patterns, deployed servlets, various parameters, etc
● classes – directory with compiled .class files
● lib – directory with .jar files (all are automatically
loaded)
●
Another possibility is to put the same things into a single .war
(Web ARchive) file, which is in the same format as .jar
Anton Keks Slide 31

web.xml example
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Hello</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>net.azib.java.HelloServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>name</param-name>
<param-value>mega_value</param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Hello</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/hello*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
Anton Keks Slide 32

Apache Digester
●
Is a 3rd party jar for reading of XML
– stores data directly in Java domain object tree (not DOM), e.g. Customer,
Order
– similar to unmarshalling; stack-based approach
– rules can be created either programmatically or put into an XML file
● Example
– Digester digester = new Digester();
digester.push(this);

digester.addObjectCreate(“customers/customer”, Customer.class);
digester.setProperties(“customers/customer”);
digester.addSetNext(“customers/customer”, “addCustomer”,
Customer.class.getName());

digester.addCallMethod(“customers/customer/address”, “setAddress”, 0);

digester.parse(“customers.xml”);

Anton Keks Slide 33

More info
●
Good source of information and tutorials about
all W3, XML and related technologies
– http://www.w3schools.com/

Anton Keks Slide 34

Java course - XML, XSLT and XPath

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