Summary

A small library to ease the parsing of third-party files and streams, mapping them to/from Java Beans. This allows the developer to write a single format description, which maps parsed data to Bean properties without having to write separate code between reading and writing.

jFDT is an evolution of the parsing concepts used in SimpleWAVIO.

Example

Example snippet which reads/writes Terminal Velocity game level definition files. public class DEFFile implements ThirdPartyParseable { int numEnemyDefinitions; EnemyDefinition [] enemyDefinitions; int numPlacements; EnemyPlacement [] enemyPlacements; @Override public void describeFormat() throws UnrecognizedFormatException { Parser.stringEndingWith("\r\n",Parser.property("numEnemyDefinitions", int.class), false); Parser.arrayOf(getNumEnemyDefinitions(), "enemyDefinitions", EnemyDefinition.class); Parser.stringEndingWith("\r\n", Parser.property("numPlacements",int.class), false); Parser.arrayOf(getNumPlacements(), "enemyPlacements", EnemyPlacement.class); } // // Standard bean getters/setters, nested classes go here, etc // }

Strengths

• Save time with bigger parsing projects by taking care of reading and writing routines in one run.
• Read/Write third-party formats to/from simple Beans.
• Map Strings, integers, byte blocks
• Transparent endian conversion
• Arrays of objects, recursive parsing.
• 'Magic data' expectation to identify or verify a data format.
• Checking data against multiple possible classes to identify a format on-the-fly, including trying all member classes or classes with a package or packages. (poorly tested)

Weaknesses

• Cannot modify or resize a file in-place - must read/modify/write.
• Though some efforts were made to make file descriptions simple and flexible, there is a lot of room for improvement.
• May break Eclipse JarInJarLoader functionality

Prerequisites

• Java 6

Copyright (C) 2012 Chuck Ritola