The last important matter of business is to mention that all input and
output for your command parser will be in XML (eXtensible Markup
Language). If you've never heard of XML, ask your friend Google about
it, and you'll be in no short supply of information, especially since
the newest version of MS office replaces the .doc format
with XML as the default. This is because XML offers a
couple of major advantages to a standard text-based command parser;
the first is that it is largely more relevant to a data structures
course since the structure of XML is a general tree. The second is
that XML is popping up all over the IT industry, and chances are that
you will be dealing with XML at your place of employment. It's
becoming the new standard for information exchange, so it's a good
thing to be learning. Another great thing about XML is that, in the
past, students were required to error-check the commands. Dr. Hugue
is a dependability expert, and she believes strongly in writing
dependable code; a malformed text command should not crash your
program. XML is easily validated (both syntactically and
structurally); so you can use pre-existing and readily available tools
to confirm that both the input and output XML is error-free.
As of Java 5.0, Java contains many interfaces to process and validate XML.
You are encouraged to take advantage of them. We will provide you with a
Java class called XmlUtility which does most of the heavy lifting for you.
It is discussed in another section.
MM Hugue
2019-01-27
