XMLMath

The Xmlmath project is an expression evaluation engine that is designed to take XML files as input, evaluate the problem, which is often mathematical, and calculate the result. This software has a basic expression structure that consists of a tree of nested XML tags. Each tag reads the value of its child nodes, applies an operation to it, and returns the result to its parent tag.

To illustrate, the expression that calculates 1+1 is represented with the following XML tags:






It is important to note that the XMLmath expression parser validates the input files against the XML schema. Thus, users are always required to include the proper XML namespace directive in the expression's root tag.

Xmlmath has some requirements that users need to be aware of. It is written in Java 1.5 and, as such, requires a 1.5 runtime environment. Older Java environments are currently not supported due to the specific 1.5 features utilized by Xmlmath. Additionally, while Xmlmath uses the open-source xmlbeans library for parsing its expression files, it is not necessary to install xmlbeans separately. The binary distributions of Xmlmath come with a built-in copy of xmlbeans.

The most recent release of Xmlmath has a lot of new features. Users can now use Xmlmath as a library and pass arguments to expressions. The if/then/else elements were made optional in "choose", "for", and "sum", and nested "include" URLs are now relative to each other. Conditional evaluation with if/then/else was added, and the stanza/declare order was switched so that declarations may require stanzas. Additionally, includes, stanzas, and declarations are allowed directly in "stanza" and "declare", and "listItem" was added.

The new release also has explicit casting, and "linkBoolean," "inlineBoolean," "listSum," and "rnd" were added. Users can now make declarations const, which means they are evaluated only once. Overall, the recent release of Xmlmath has expanded its capabilities to support a wider range of expression evaluation needs.