Forschungsthemen
[] Data-Centric Object-Hierarchical Mapping or Will the Real XML Data Binding Please Stand Up?
As to the use of XML for storing information, recent developments indicate that it will increase in the future. Applications dealing with hierarchical data will need to store, process, and exchange large amounts of information. Native XML databases are well-suited for storing hierarchical data and they offer convenient means for extracting and importing hierarchical information in the XML format. In practice, many of these applications
will be developed in high-level class-based object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Java, and .NET.
To access and modify structured information, software usually exploits this structure instead of directly working with the raw data and XML data is not an exception. Object-oriented applications backed by a hierarchical database often
work with objects that represent the data sets in the database. For this, a conversion layer needs to be placed in between the application and the database, which translates data into objects and
back. Although adding a level of indirection, this approach has striking advantages, such as preserving the object-oriented quality throughout the whole application and ensuring consistency constraints
not expressible at the database level. However, fundamental differences between the hierarchical and the object-oriented models bear severe limitations, which require growing manual intervention by the application programmers as the complexity of
the processed data grows.
The thesis will accompany the development of a prototype for a high-performance data-centric object-hierarchical mapping technology that bridges the gap between object-oriented applications for processing XML-based data and native XML databases. The software has to be independent of the underlying logical model of XML documents, it should build on open standards and reuse existing technologies where possible. Ideally, application developers should be able to use it for
generating classes from XML document schemas and for accessing database functionality (such as transaction support).
Betreuer: Ilie Savga