The Design And Implementation Of A Universal File Format Conversion System

Almost all the universal file conversion software is the alias of the integration of special file conversion software, we hardly can find a kind of universal file conversion software that base on the abstract modle of file formats and can add a new conversion without coding. However, due to the promoting needs of system integration, software interact more frequently, and conversion software providers are more difficult to anticipate what kind of file conversion software do users need. So such kind of universal coversion software is needed, user can define the conversion procedure by a kind of easy-learning definition language without traditional coding works.Because file formats are arbitrary, defining direct coversion methods between files formats is not only a huge amount of work but also prone to cause the system to be more complex, what's more user must take much time to study, but if use a mature and widely accepted format as a transitional intermediate format, we can reduce the complexity of the definition of language. The intermediate format is the XML format, XML format has two key technologies we can leverage, the first one is the XML Schema, we can extend it to define the conversion procedure from the original format to XML format; the second one is the XSLT, we can directly use it to transform XML documents into the target format.The implementation of the system is an extension of JaxMe, JaxMe is a kind of open source JAXB implementation, and JAXB is a binding standards between XML documents and Java Beans. We can leverage the XML Schema parser and the XML document generation and transformation framework of JaxMe, and the work we need is to extend JaxMe to support our transformation language to implementation the binding from any format documents to Java Beans, so that we can serialize these Java Beans to XML documents, and then use XSLT converter transform them to target formats.