QuiltParser: JavaCC Grammar for Quilt XML Query Language

Credits

The codes for XSLT and XPath are originally from Ingo Macherius & Gerald Huck {macherius,huck}@gmd.de. Their codes can be downloaded from JavaCC Grammar Repository.

Quilt

QuiltParser is a parser for the Quilt XML query language written with JavaCC as a part of XPRESS project at UCLA / CSD.

This small, implementable language has been recently proposed by Robie, Chamberlin, and Florescu; it integrates the advantages of various languages while meeting the W3C's XML Query Requirements. More information on Quilt may be found at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/quilt.html. The current implementation is based on the BNF and test examples from this paper (presented at XML Europe, Paris, June 2000)

JavaCC

The Java Comiler Compiler (JavaCC) is a popular generator for use with Java applications. It was originally written by engineers at Sun and now being maintained by Metamata as a public software. JavaCC is the most popular compiler generation tool for Java. More information and distribution of JavaCC (latest version 1.1) may be found at http://www.metamata.com/JavaCC/

Download

The Quilt grammar file (JJ file) is here QuiltParser.jj. If you are not interested in JavaCC grammar file and just want to download the parser codes in java, get this tar ball and untar it:

      tar xvf QuiltParser.tar

A collection of working queries from the Quilt paper may be found here queries. Look at the known bug list below.

Known Users

If you use QuiltParser in your project and like to be included in our list of the known users, please let us know.

Usage

After installing JavaCC, run javacc on the JJ file to generate Java files that implement the parser and lexical analyzer:

      javacc QuiltParser.jj

This will generate several java files. Compile those using your favorite java compiler. Finally, simply invoke the Java interpreter

      java QuiltParser [-debug] [query]

The -debug option will give a trace of calls. The query is a text file of the Quilt query.  Without a file, the input is standard input.

QuiltParser will either output a message that says:

• the query was successfully parsed or
• an error parse message, including the bad token and line number in query.

• V 0.9.1: Following is NOT supported in the current implementation. We did attempt to resolve these problems, but either these constructs aren't in the original BNF, are too complicated to add to the existing parser, or are still under development by the authors.
  • DEFINE construct (queries/paper/query8.txt)
  • Parser accepts < ... > , not < ... /> (queries/paper/query14.txt)
  • colon, EXISTS .. IN constructs (queries/caseTEXT/Q2.txt)

• V 0.9.1
  • More extensive testing based on the Don Chamberlin's use cases.
• V 0.9
  • Initial release.