Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Representing the Legacy Non-XML Grammars in XML

We'll take a detailed look in the next three chapters at each of the languages we'll use to describe the grammars of our legacy file formats. However, let's look at the overall approach since it will help clarify some of the classes and methods discussed later in this chapter. There are four major areas we want to address here.

• The XML instance documents that correspond to our legacy file formats

• The file description documents that describe the grammar and other characteristics of our legacy file formats

• The schemas for our file description documents

• The schemas that are optionally used to validate our instance documents