Conal-Tuohy / SIMILE-Gadget

An XML inspector

GADGET

What is this?

Gadget is an XML inspector.

What can I do with this?

When you want to have a condensed representation of (normally, a lot!) of well-formed XML data. This is normally useful in situations like:

• data understanding and exploration
• data migration/transformation
• data cleanup
• data complexity evaluation
• schema adherence understanding
• schema emergence

Requirements

Gadget is a command line application and requires:

• A Java 1.4 or later compatible virtual machine for your operating system.
• Maven 2.0 or later must be installed and the "mvn" command found in your shell path (get it from http://maven.apache.org if you don't have it already).

Running Gadget is 5 steps

from your favorite unix shell or from the windows DOS prompt and being connected to the internet type:

1. mvn package
2. ./gadget index -o data/blah -r /path/to/your/pile/of/xml/
3. ./gadget chart data/blah
4. Make a copy of dataset.properties in your data/blah folder, and edit it to describe the dataset.
5. mvn jetty:run

Point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080/ to browse gadget.

NOTE: on Windows, use gadget instead of ./gadget.

What do the above steps do?

1. builds gadget and fetches the required libraries from the web
2. generates the gadget indices used by the web application by processing your XML data. Since the -r option is turned on, it will recursively scan the given directory for all the *.xml files, process them and save the indices in data/blah
3. generates the distribution charts and the sparklines. This stage is optional, meaning that the web application will perform the same operation at runtime if not performed before, but if your dataset is large it's better to pre-compute them to increase the gadget's startup performance when browsing.
4. adds metadata describing the dataset
5. runs the gadget web application and provides you a user interface way to access the generated indices via your web browser.

Are there any more in-depth docs?

Point your browser to the ./docs/index.html file for this version's documentation, or see the final version of the project's Wiki on the Internet Archive.

Licensing and legal issues

Gadget is open source software and is licensed under the BSD license located in the LICENSE.txt file located in the same directory as this very file you are reading.

Note however that this software depends on libraries that are not released under the same license. If you redistribute the software it's up to you to make sure that your redistribution complies to the sum of all the requirements not just to the ones of the Gadget license.

Credits

This software was created by the SIMILE project and originally written by Stefano Mazzocchi

It was converted to Git by Conal Tuohy, from a copy taken from the Google Code SVN Archive, retaining some of the history that was still available in SVN.