Java / Abstract Syntax Tree into XML representation

Question

do you know of any tool which creates an AST from a Java program or class and creates an XML representation (Collection or single XML document) from the AST?

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Answer 1

Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit with its Java Front End can do this directly. You ask DMS to parse the file, and produce an XML dump using a command line switch ++XML.

See What would an AST (abstract syntax tree) for an object-oriented programming language look like?.

As a general rule, we don't recommend this, for several reasons:

• XML output for real files is really enormous, and takes a lot of time to write and read

• Most people do this because they believe with an XML representation that just a little bit of XSLT will get them what they want

• If you intend to modify the code, once you have the XML you pretty much can't regenerate it.

• The machinery that DMS provides (attribute grammars, symbol tables, flow analyses, pattern matching and source-to-source transformations, source regeneration from the AST, is what you really want, and you get access to it by using DMS after the parsing step without exporting the XML ever