Welcome to the VMTools page.
VM Tools is the beginning of a collection of XML-oriented tools for the java platform. The toolkit is developed by VM Systems, Inc. and is available under an open source license.
This release of the toolkit contains tools for automatically generating differences between two XML documents and may be of particular interest to members of the OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) who have developed XML standards using a document difference representation.
If you have any questions or have found vmtools useful we'd like to hear from you, send us a note at: vmtools@vmguys.com
News
- February 11, 2002 - v0.5 released (see changes)
- December 12, 2001 - v0.4 released (see changes)
- November 19, 2001 - v0.3 released (see changes)
- October 8, 2001 - Initial release
Features
VM Tools has the following features:- Uses sophisticated algorithm to calculate difference between two XML documents
- Supports generic OTA_Update message generation/processing
- The difference document generated is optimized for minimal size
- Core code is generic and extensible
- Designed to plug into your java application
- Minimal subset XPath implementation allows use of simple XPath notation to reference change points within the source document.
- Supports mark-up style documents in addition to data documents
Limitations
This implementation will work for data-oriented XML and for document-oriented XML. Specific limitations are as follows:- XML comments are not supported
- XML processing instructions are not supported
- There is no provision for dealing with small differences in extremely lengthy CDATA sections
- Currently the only difference representation supported is the OTA difference notation (however alternate representations may be developed and plugged in through extensions)
Downloads
VMTools 0.5 is available for download here in the following formats:
Older versions still available:
- VMTools-0.4 (.tar.gz) - older version
- VMTools-0.4 (.zip) - older version
- VMTools-0.3 (.tar.gz) - older version
- VMTools-0.3 (.zip) - older version
- VMTools-0.2 (.tar.gz) - older version
- VMTools-0.2 (.zip) - older version
The downloadable distributions include source, documentation and
pre-compiled jar files. N.B. the .tar.gz distribution uses the GNU tar extensions
and may not work with the classic tar utility. The .zip distribution will work on any platform
(you can use the jarcommand line tool to unpack it if you don't have zip utilities).
Resources
The following resources are available:- User documentation
- VMTools source license
- OTA Difference Generator - sample application
- OTA Patch Applicator - sample application
