Data processing: software development – installation – and managem – Software program development tool – Translation of code
Reexamination Certificate
2000-12-08
2004-08-03
Das, Chameli Chaudhuri (Department: 2122)
Data processing: software development, installation, and managem
Software program development tool
Translation of code
C717S138000, C717S139000, C717S153000, C717S140000, C715S252000, C715S252000, C709S231000, C709S246000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06772413
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF INVENTION
The present invention relates to data transfer, and more particularly to an automated system to effect data interchange.
BACKGROUND
Networks and networked applications have grown dramatically in number, size and complexity over the past decade. While the Internet is the most prominent example, internal LAN's (Intranets) and distributed computing are also part of this growth. By definition, all networked applications need to send and receive information over a network, often communicating with other applications. The great variety of formats in existence makes integration of applications and data sources a difficult and expensive problem. Current data encoding standards are constantly replaced by newer technologies, further complicating the problem of providing connectivity between network nodes. From bit-encodings of low-level network transport protocols to HTML and XML, the problem of data and protocol translation is a complex and difficult one, because of the need to provide both high flexibility and high performance.
One of the more recent data encoding formats enjoying wide adoption, especially on the Internet, has been XML, a part of the SGML family of document description languages.
The proliferation of interconnected sites or domains known as the World Wide Web (“Web”) was initially developed largely using the document description language known as HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML was used predominantly to specify the structure of Web documents or “pages” using logical terms. HTML, however, has inherent limitations for Web document design, primarily resulting from the limited, predefined tags available in HTML to define elements in a document or page. Nonetheless, HTML-defined documents continue to exist in significant quantities on the Web.
EXtensible Markup Language (XML) was developed as a document format protocol or language for the Web that is more flexible than HTML. XML allows tags used to define elements of a page or document to be flexibly defined by the developer of the page. Thus Web pages can be designed to effectively function like database records with selectively defined tags representing data items for specific applications (e.g. product code, department, price in the context of a purchase order or invoice document or page).
In the world of Web content, the use of XML is growing as it becomes the preferred data format in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) Web commerce sectors (e-business). The tremendous and continuing growth of XML in B2B applications has led to a great number of different XML e-business vocabularies and schemas. There are standardization efforts driven by industry associations, consortia, governments, academia and even the United Nations. Merely storing or transmitting e-business data “in XML” is not a guarantee of interoperability between e-business commercial entities or sites. Even the method of specifying a particular structure for an XML document has not been agreed upon, with several incompatible methods in wide use. It is therefore necessary to perform conversions between different XML formats to achieve server-to-server transfer of invoices, purchase orders and other business data in the e-business context. The problem of interoperability is exacerbated by the commingling of XML and HTML e-business sites on the Web.
Successful B2B and B2C sites are being called upon to support a greater variety of clients and client protocols. That is, sites must be accessible by different browsers running on clients, e.g. Netscape or Internet Explorer, and by different versions of these (and other) browsers. Additionally, the nature of clients and client protocols is changing and adding to the problem of interoperability. Different clients, in the form of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) enabled cellular phones, process XML content but need to convert it to different versions of HTML and WAP to ensure a broad and seamless reach across all kinds of web clients, from phones to powerful Unix workstations. As the diversity of web-connected devices grows, so grows the need to provide dynamic conversion, such as XML-to-HTML and XML-to-WAP, for e-business applications.
The World Wide Web Consortium has defined eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) as a standard method for addressing both XML-HTML and XML-XML conversions. There are several freely available and commercial XSL processor implementations for java and C/C++ e-business applications. However, standards-compliance, stability and performance vary widely across implementations. Additionally, even the fastest current implementations are much slower than necessary to meet the throughput requirements for either B2C or B2B applications. The great flexibility provided by XML encoding generally means that such conversions are complex and time-consuming.
The XSL World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation which addresses the need to transform data from one XML format into another or from an XML format into an HTML or other “output” format, as currently specified includes three major components in an XSL processor: an XSL transformation engine (XSLT), a node selection and query module (Xpath), and a formatting and end-user presentation layer specification (Formatting Objects). XML-to-XML data translation is primarily concerned with the first two modules, while the Formatting Objects are most important for XML-to-HTML or XML-to-PDF document rendering. A typical XSL implementation comprises a parser for the transform, a parser for the source data, and an output stream generator—three distinct processes. Known XSL transformation engines (XSLT) typically rely on recursive processing of trees of nodes, where every XML element, attribute or text segment is represented as a node. Because of this, implementations suggested in the prior art simply optimize the transformation algorithms and will necessarily result in limitations on performance.
An XSL stylesheet is itself an XML file that contains a number of template-based processing instructions. The XSLT processor parses the stylesheet file and applies any templates that match the input data. It operates by conditionally selecting nodes in an input tree, transforming them in a number of ways, copying them to an output tree and/or creating new nodes in the output tree. Known XSLT implementations suffer from terrible performance limitations. While suitable for java applets or small-scale projects, they are not yet fit to become part of the infrastructure. Benchmarks of the most popular XSLT processors show that throughput of 10-150 kilobytes/second is typical. This is 10 times slower than an average diskette drive and roughly equivalent to a 128 Kbit/s ISDN line. Many websites today have sustained bandwidths at or above T
1
speeds (1500 Kbit/s) and the largest ones require 100 Mbit/s or faster connections to the Internet backbone. Clearly, unless XSLT processing is to become the chief performance barrier in B2C and B2B operations, its performance has to improve by orders of magnitude.
There are a number of reasons for such poor performance. To transform one XML vocabulary to another, the processor must parse the transform, parse the source data, walk the two parse trees to apply the transform and finally output the data into a stream. Some of the better implementations allow the transform parsing as a separate step, thereby avoiding the need to repeat that step for every document or data record to be processed by the same transform. However, the transformation step is extremely expensive and consumes an overwhelming portion of processing time. Because XSLT relies on recursive processing of trees of nodes, where every XML element, attribute or text segment is represented as a node, merely optimizing the implementation of the algorithms cannot attain the necessary results. Thus current state-of-the-art XSLT implementations have to sacrifice performance in order to maintain the flexibility that is the very essence of XSLT and XML itself. So while XML and XSL
Das Chameli Chaudhuri
DataPower Technology, Inc.
Gammell David D.
Lowry David D.
Michaelis Brian L.
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