As mentioned in the introduction to GXL, GXL is an XML sublanguage for exchanging program graphs. As there is no current standard in this direction, it is necessary to have the possibility to convert GXL into other formats and vice versa. The intention of the GCF is to make the development of such converter tools as comfortable as possible by giving them a common base upon which they can rely. Thus the GCF has an integrated XML parser called AElfred, optimized for GXL documents, and. it includes a hierarchy of abstract classes, which reflects the GXL Graph Model. As a demonstration of its functionality, two default implementations of the framework are included. The first one outputs a GXL file (good for <...>2GXL-converters) and the second one parses a GXL document and holds its data tree in memory (good for manipulating GXL documents and converting them into other formats). The structure and task of the GCF are shown in the figure below.
Figure 1 : Structure and task of the GCF
To fully unterstand how the GCF works and what the user has to do in detail, see Usage of the GCF.
