A Java Library for Bidirectional XML Transformation

Abstract

We propose a Java library BiXJ for bidirectional XML transformation. The feature of BiXJ is that when writing one transformation, users can get its corresponding backward transformation for free. The transformations in this library adopt the native XML data model and concentrate on the widely accepted methods of constructing and destructing XML documents. By this design principle, we expect this library is expressive enough, and moreover it does not confuse the users due to providing too many transformations. The di‐culty in this work is to seek more suitable semantics for the bidirectional transformations since the semantics in the previous work is too limited to express both useful transformations (e.g., generating multiple elements) and updates . To demonstrate its usability and expressiveness, we have bidirectionalized some typical examples of XQuery and XSLT using this library. The results of these experiments are promising.