Oracle CAM v3.0 Ships With JSON Support

Oracle has shipped an improved version 3.0 of the CAM editor toolset that combines XML and JSON support using the OASIS CAM templates standard.

The CAM editor is an open source toolkit for building and deploying XML exchanges and open data APIs. A WYSIWYG visual structure editor simplifies the process of developing and managing XML business information exchanges and schema.

The main focus here is on integrating JSON handling alongside the existing XML capabilities. This is intended to provide developers with the ability to use either or both from the single set of infrastructure.

Oracle Public Sector NIEM team lead David Webber explains that these developments provide JSON developers with the ability to build visual data models, use robust XML content validation services, and generate XSD schema and JAXB bindings — without having to do all those tasks by hand or know the nuances of complex XSD schema or XML handling.

Webber says that for XML developers, it now provides a "rapid ability" to use JSON as an option in their information exchanges and web service integration for supporting mobile and web-based application needs.

NOTE: The CAM toolkit also automates the tasks of generating supporting artifacts such as business documentation, cross-reference spreadsheets, models, XML Schema, JAXB data bindings, and test XML instances generation including SQL data extracts.

"In addition to these new JSON capabilities, the existing functionality has significantly improved performance and capability," said Oracle's Webber. "The CAMV validation engine now runs up to 20 times faster for large XML validation input and with templates containing setChoice() rules. For comparison, a 500+ rules validation template with large 15MB sample COBie CAD/CAM smart building XML export now runs in 19 seconds instead of previously taking over 9 minutes."

"The drag-and-drop dictionary components handling has similarly been significantly improved. Large sets of components now are inserted in real time with low memory overhead thus dramatically improving the user experience and ability to quickly build information exchanges from XML dictionaries of predefined domain components," added Webber.

"For the Open-XDX open data API toolset we have added bidirectional support. This means using the same CAM template, and the SQL drag-and-drop interface you can design Update/Insert SQL database web services along with the query services. Again the focus is on providing simple and rapid application development support," he said.

NOTE: Example code and resources can be found at our GitHub site while online demonstrations are available from the VerifyXML.org site.

Further enhancements include a new Dictionary Evaluation report. This tool analyzes the XML components in a dictionary and highlights design issues, omissions, duplicates, and more that would be extremely tedious to detect by hand. This allows a development team to collaboratively improve the quality of their core components and their reuse across a project implementation.

Last but not least, Oracle confirms that it has improved the XSD schema importing and exporting, resolving a range of complex nuances not previously handled and allowing improved accuracy and compatibility with XSD schema.