Introduction

Bidirectional Transformations and Its Application

Bidirectional transformations for updating database

When there exists a transformation from view to database (source) as well as a transformation source to view, we say the transformation is bidirectional. When a bidirectional transformation between source and view is given, reflecting the modifications on the view to the source is possible as well as reflecting the modifications on the source to the view.

Bidirectional transformation language reduces coding efforts

Our group has been investigated the bidirectional transformation for XML and proposed two languages X/Inv and Bi-X. Both language is for describing forward transformation from source to view, and the backward transformation from view to source is automatically generated. Therefore, the programmer needs to write and maintain a program of only forward transformation, without worrying about writing a inconsistent code between forward and backward transformations.

Providing a bidirectional transformation service available from anyplace

We have developed Bi-X server for bidirectional transformation processing as a Web service. So users can harness the power of bidirectional transformations without installing any bidirectional language package. The inputs for backward transformation includes the source XML data as well as the modified view because the amount of information of the view is less than information of the source.

Bidirectionalizing programs written in existing languages

Since the programming style of Bi-X is point free, writing programs in Bi-X is difficult for most programmers. So we are providing an automatic translator that translates a program written in XQuery or Haml into Bi-X program.

Possibilities for various applications

This framework can be used with xfy that is an XML application development environment developed by Justsystem corporation. With xfy, it is possible to edit XML contents such as XHTML and SVG in an optimized way and reflect the editing to the source data. Another application under development is updating mechanism for Web page maintenance. Using Javascript that cooperates with Bi-X server, users can edit Web pages on any terminals.