Preface

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In order to create applications of this category, you might have to define a DTD for your information. Then you have to write classes to import and export information from your XML document(s) (validating using your application's DTD if you have one). You must also write the classes which create the user interface in your application. The user of your application can view and modify information using the GUI (graphical user interface), and they can save (and load) their information to (and from) an XML file (that might use your DTD); in other words, they can save (and load) their information to (and from) an ApplicationML file (where Application is the name of your application). Some examples are AddressBookML, MathML, SVGML, etc.

The classes that import and export information from your ApplicationML file must use the parser and SAX or DOM API in order to import the information. These classes can access this information by using one of the following strategies:

1. Use DOM to directly manipulate the information stored in the document (which DOM turns into a tree of nodes). This document object is created by the DOM XML parser after it reads in the XML document. This option leads to messy and hard-to-understand code. Also, this works better for document-type data rather than just computer generated data (like data structures and objects used in your code).
2. Create your own Java object model that imports information from the XML document by using either SAX or DOM. This kind of object model only uses SAX or DOM to initialize itself with the information contained in the XML document(s). Once the parsing and initialization of your object model is completed, DOM or SAX isn't used anymore. You can use your own object model to accessed or modify your information without using SAX or DOM anymore. So you manipulate your information using your own objects, and rely on the SAX or DOM APIs to import the information from your ApplicationML file into memory (as a bunch of Java objects). You can think of this object model as an in-memory instance of the information that came was "serialized" in your XML document(s). Changes made to this object model are made persistent automatically, you have to deal with persistence issues (ie, write code to save your object model to a persistence layer as XML).
3. Create your own Java object model (adapter) that uses DOM to manipulate the information in your document object tree (that is created by the parser). This is slightly different from the 2nd option, because you are still using the DOM API to manipulate the document information as a tree of nodes, but you are just wrapping an application specific API around the DOM objects, so its easier for you to write the code. So your object model is an adapter on top of DOM (ie, it uses the adapter pattern). This application specific API uses DOM and actually accesses or modifies information by going to the tree of nodes. Changes made to the object model still have to be made persistence (if you want to save any changes). You are in essence creating a thin layer on top of the tree of nodes that the parser creates, where the tree of nodes is accessed or modified eventually depending on what methods you invoke on your object model.

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