Description:

DAX is an experimental system for generating documents using XML. This page you are reading, as well as all the other project pages on the Hill Systems website, their various views (print, text, xml, rtf), the project list, etc., have all been dynamically generated using DAX components.

DAX is a collection of components that work in concert to generate documents. These components include a common interface for XML parsers, incorporating third-party parsers such as Apache xerces or IBM's xml4j; a content dictionary subsystem that converts complex XML content into simple references to lists, nested structures, and text constructs; a document markup language for inserting text content, looping across lists, performing tests, etc., within a document template; fine-grained text formatting controls via a pluggable "formatting beans" architecture; and a translation component using XSLT rules processing for importing any XML document into DAX. Most importantly, because DAX is standardized on XML for input data source, virtually any data source that can be rendered as XML can be used by DAX, including data from relational databases.

Applications that can benefit from DAX include: form letter generation; simplified access to XML content for JSP's, servlets, and other document generation engines; and support for documents requiring multiple views and formats (web pages, word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.) from the same content data.