Vxt: Visual xml transformer

The ever growing amount of heterogeneous data exchanged through the Internet, combined with the popularity of XML, make structured document transformations an increasingly important application domain. Most of the existing solutions for expressing XML transformations are textual languages, such as XSLT or DOM combined with a general-purpose programming language. Several tools build on top of these languages, providing a graphical environment and debugging facilities. Transformations are however still specified in a textual way using the underlying language (often XSLT), thus requiring users to learn it. We believe that visual programming techniques are wellsuited to representing XML structures and make the specification of transformations simpler. We propose a visual language for the specification of XML transformations in an interactive environment based on a zoomable user interface toolkit and on two target languages specialised in structure transformations: Circus and XSLT. 1. Overview VXT is a visual programming language combined with an interactive environment, written in Java, and specifically designed for programming XML document transformations. It aims at providing high quality visual support for data structure representation and manipulation, so that the user will be freed from maintaining complex mental models of data structures, which play a central role in the transformation specification. VXT tries to simplify the complexity brought by the different levels of abstraction (transformations rules, document instances, schemas) by unifying them in a single visual representation system (formally studied in [2]) focused on tree structures and based on a variation of treemap