Shortcuts
Documentation
Community
Resources

Features

DRB APIŽ is mainly an Application Programming Interface (API): its functions must be called through an application to be operational. Yet, DRB APIŽ supports a few application modules. For instance, it allows executing queries directly through command lines. DRB APIŽ is encoded in Java programming language. It employs packages within JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition, v 1.4.2 API Specification provided by Sun Microsystems. DRB APIŽ has only one dependency as the employed Java platform has built in most interfaces and dealing with XML technology. The remaining dependency library is the logging service API log4j 1.2.8 developed by Apache Software Foundation.

DRB APIŽ is composed of a main interface which handles data once they are represented according to the unified data model. This main interface includes fr.gael.drb and fr.gael.drb.value packages which contain all classes and interfaces respectively required to build the tree data structure and to encode the data value. DRB APIŽ is also composed of several implementations that wrap information extracted from target data file and convert them according to the unified data model. It contains today nine implementations defined in:

  • fr.gael.drb.impl.file for files and directories within file system or accessed through http protocol
  • fr.gael.drb.impl.ftp for remote file accessed through ftp protocol
  • fr.gael.drb.impl.xml for XML documents
  • fr.gael.drb.imp.sds for binary files
  • fr.gael.drb.impl.jar for jar files
  • fr.gael.drb.imp.tar for tar files
  • fr.gael.drb.impl.zip for zip files

DRB APIŽ contains also facilities which add extra tools to manipulate data:

  • the XQuery engine defined by fr.gael.drb.query
  • the XML Schema validator defined by fr.gael.drb.xsd.

Prerequesites

To start with DRB APIŽ, you obviously need to have Java programming skills, especially for compilation and execution except if you want to use command lines only.

You also need to know basics from XML concepts, XPath and XQuery language. Morevover, you need to know XML Schema to be able to program some schema. All these technologies are documented through W3C on the following URLs: http://www.w3.org/XML, http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath, http://www.w3.org/XML/Query and http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema. Reading the Web pages edited by Refsnes Data at http://www.w3schools.com are very helpful for beginners.