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Introduction to LBXML Operator: a Java API-based tool for XML insertion, modification, searching, and removal. (Java & XML).

Article Excerpt
LBXML Operator is a Java API-based XML tool that supports insertion, modification, searching, and removal on XML files. Of the many available XML parsers and XML tools, none provide APIs to complete the above functionalities when manipulation conditions become complex--they support only simple operations on XML.

With LBXML Operator, after specifying conditions using Java-rich data structures, any particular value between tags in an XML file can be touched and returned as Java data structures.

Application Situations

With the development of the Internet and distributed technologies, XML has become more and more important in data representation, automatic data exchange over heterogeneous platforms, data modeling, search engines, and even data storage. When developers use XML it is essential that they be able to access values between tags. XML is usually used to describe complex data structures, and being able to manipulate XML makes developers happy--LBXML Operator is a good tool for this.

Representing data in XML

Before XML, developers had to represent data in plain text format. To describe data, they had to define their own format using special symbols like "|", "#", and so on. Plain text isn't standard and can be understood only by the developer who defines it. Without proper comments, even the developers themselves forget the sense of the format after some time. XML eliminates this nightmare--developers can define meaningful tags and put corresponding values between them. Using rich XML data structures, they can represent data in a human-readable format and express a variety of senses.

However, developers may need to access XML files. For example, if an XML file is a configuration file, after the program starts to run it has to read some initial data from it. At that time, LBXML Operator can be used to retrieve data from the configuration file in XML. Some information in the configuration file may need to be updated after the program runs. LBXML Operator is a tool to modify the corresponding data in the configuration file.

Data storage

Another advantage XML gives developers is the ability to store data in XML, temporarily or permanently. Frequently a lot of initial data is required for a program to start up, or a great deal of output data is generated while the program is running. A good solution is to store all the data in XML files temporarily, which decreases the number of visiting databases. Sometimes, if the system capability allows or the amount of data is not too large, it's feasible to store the data in XML files instead of databases.

In this case it's necessary to manipulate XML files just...

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