javanicus

xwork: visualising flow of control with XSLT and SVG

Posted on 17 Dec 2003

I've been fiddling around trying to visualize the xwork flow of control, and have come up with an XSLT based stylesheet which will transform your xwork.xml into a SVG graphic.

i.e.

xwork.xml
XLST> SVG

here is the XSLT stylesheet - xwork2svg.xslt
to use with Xalan: java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -in xwork.xml -xsl xwork2svg.xslt -out xwork.svg

example SVG, built using xwork.xml in webwork-example.war
SVG viewers are available from Adobe SVG Zone, and Apache batik-squiggle

I think lots of things could be improved with the stylesheet, such as:

arrows to indicate chained actions
standard order for success/error/input etc...
other transformations such as HTML

I think it is quite useful, as it allows the flow of control to be quickly groked, and can be generated as part of the build, for documentation purposes.
Let me know what you think...

17 Dec 2003 |