XPlainer-Eclipse: explaining XPath within Eclipse™

ABSTRACT

The popularity of XML has motivated the development of novel XML processing tools many of which embed the XPath language for XML querying, transformation, constraint specification, etc. XPath developers (as well as less technical users) have access to commercial tools to help them use the language effectively. Example tools include debuggers that return the result of XPath subexpressions visualized in the context of the input XML document.This paper provides a glimpse of the functionality of XPlainer-Eclipse, a novel kind of query understanding and debugging tool that provides visual explanations of why XPath expressions return a specific answer. XPlainer-Eclipse combines editors for visualizing both XML documents and XPath expressions as trees together with the explanation of the answers.

REFERENCES

• 1: Eclipse. http://www.eclipse.org/.
• 2: Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) Project. http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/.
• 3: JXPath. http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/jxpath.
• 4: Daniele Braga , Alessandro Campi , Stefano Ceri, XQBE (XQuery By Example): A visual interface to the standard XML query language, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.30 n.2, p.398-443, June 2005 [doi>10.1145/1071610.1071613]
• 5: Mariano Consens , Alberto Mendelzon, Hy+: a Hygraph-based query and visualization system, Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.511-516, May 25-28, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States
• 6: M. P. Consens, J. W. Liu, and B. O'Farrell. XPlainer: An XPath debugging framework (demo), 2006. http://icde06.cc.gatech.edu/prog-demo.html.
• 7: M. P. Consens, J. W. Liu, and F. Rizzolo. XPlainer: Visual explanations of XPath queries. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2007) Istanbul, Turkey. IEEE Computer Society, 2007.
• 8: JAXP. Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.3. http://java.sun.com/webservices/jaxp/index.jsp.
• 9: John W. S. Liu. XPlainer: A Visual XPath Debugging Framework. Master's thesis. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/DCS/Grad/Theses/05-06MSc.html.
• 10: M. Livny , R. Ramakrishnan , K. Beyer , G. Chen , D. Donjerkovic , S. Lawande , J. Myllymaki , K. Wenger, DEVise: integrated querying and visual exploration of large datasets, Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.301-312, May 11-15, 1997, Tucson, Arizona, United States
• 11: Chris Olston , Allison Woodruff , Alexander Aiken , Michael Chu , Vuk Ercegovac , Mark Lin , Mybrid Spalding , Michael Stonebraker, DataSplash, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.550-552, June 01-04, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States
• 12: K. Vadaparty , Y. A. Aslandogan , G. Ozsoyoglu, Towards a unified visual database access, Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.357-366, May 25-28, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States
• 13: W3C. XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20, 2005.
• 14: M. Zloof. Query-by-example: A data base language. IBM Syst. J., 16(4):324--343, 1977.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: User interfaces
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

General Terms:
Languages

Keywords:
Eclipse, IDEs, XML, XPath, data visualization, debugging, program analysis