Saturday, November 3, 2007

Work in progress - my very rich swing application - part 4

Recently, I shifted focus from the "swing" factor. As I was building and polishing the application, I realized that most of my expenses are covered using my bank card. So, if the application just accepts journal entries, it is useful only to students and kids.
So, I started learning about the bank statement formats - yes, OFX - the open financial exchange format. The format is in SGML to my dismay - and there is NO SGML Parser in Java. SGML is a loosely structured but complex language to express data - and XML has replaced it in most fields. 
But anyway, I need to parse OFX. So, I turned to ANTLR - the excellent parser generator. I am in the initial stages of learning curve, but it is really interesting and simple. I think any student who is learning compiler theory should use ANTLR as the learning tool. Oh, coming back to my application - right now, the focus is on parsing only bank statements.

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