Tools

In addition to the various implementations of standards to work with XML available in Java,there are also high-level tools that leverage those standard implementations to enable advanced applications. In this section, several of those tools are examined.

Cocoon

Apache Cocoon is a high-level framework for the publishing of XML documents on the Web. It allows for the complete separation of document content, application logic, and style transformation while still maintaining a central repository and high performance implementation that seamlessly serves the document content in a variety of formats.

The Apache Cocoon server is built on top of the Apache Xerces XML parsing suite and the Apache XSLT transformation engine. Apache Cocoon is available at http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/index.html.

Batik Scalable Vector Graphics Toolkit

Although many technologies are available for XML text processing, the Batik Scalable Vector Graphics toolkit breaks the mold and has been built to produce graphics content from XML documents. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is a standard format for Web graphics that has been proposed by the W3C (the specification is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/) and is rapidly gaining acceptance on the Internet.

The Batik SVG toolkit is a set of modules that allows Scalable Vector Graphics documents to be parsed, generated, and accessed via the Document Object Model. In addition, Batik also provides a reference implementation of an SVG viewer that can be used to view SVG documents in browsers that do not yet support SVG but do support Java. Finally, Batik includes a useful tool that can turn SVG graphics documents into various raster image file formats such as JPEG and PNG.

The Batik Scalable Vector Graphics toolkit is made available at http://xml.apache.org/batik/ under the liberal Apache License and can be used for commercial development.