If you happen to be in the business of writing software serving XML documents or consuming XML documents - and if you read this post, then there is a fair chance you are - then there is always one big challenge: how do you make sure your service or client is capable of dealing with all of the XML documents you could possibly expect to be passed around?

And if you happen to come from the test-driven world, the answer is obviously: by testing it. However, if you try to do that, things might be harder than you expect at first.

What about schemas?

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Tags: Java, XML, XML Schema
Filed under Java | 5 Comments »

Earlier this week I ran into a missing feature in the Scala xml library and I ended up adding this feature myself, which turned out to be pretty simple.

I was trying to extract the text contents of an element in a piece of XML using the handy \ and \\ methods on scala.xml.NodeSeq. These methods allow you to extract sub-elements from an XML node in a way very similar to XPath, something like this:

val xml = <a><b><c>text</c></b></a>
val c1 = xml \ "b" \ "c"
val c2 = xml \\ "c"
val text = c2.text

The problem I ran into occurred when I tried to use these methods to extract an element when one of its attributes had a certain value.

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Tags: Scala, XML, xpath
Filed under Scala, XML | 3 Comments »

In many JEE apps today, you almost cannot forgo XML. Whether it is in configuration, data structures or service interfaces, you will certainly use a number of XML files. In a recent project we had to deal with a number of external services which used an XML interface. Little did we know that we introduced a potential time-bomb in our application... (more...)

Tags: Eclipse, eclipse memory analyzer, Java, maven2, memory leak, OutOfMemoryError, XML
Filed under Eclipse, Java, Maven, Performance, Testing | 3 Comments »