The conformance tests available from the standards bodies CableLabs or the DVB verify compliance of receivers with the specification. To ensure full interoperability of applications across all certified platforms, it is necessary to test that applications are also conformant. XAV is an application validator that performs this task.

For OCAP, XAV is of particular use to the MSOs, cable operators, platform vendors and OCAP application developers. For example, an MSO wants to avoid potential risks such as applications:

1. crashing or otherwise disrupting an OCAP platform implementation (due to invalid or non-well-formed content)
2. abusing the platform security access control mechanisms; and
3. burdening the platform resources

• Validity. Are all resources well formed and adhere to mandatory constraints? Does the application as a whole adhere to mandatory content and behavioral constraints?
• Interoperability. Does the application attempt to access non-standard APIs in platform-defined packages? Does the application define all referenced APIs in application-defined packages? Does the content or behavior use non-interoperable features?
• Security. Does the application make reference to privileged operations for which it has failed to request permission? Does the application rely upon always being granted access to a privileged operation that may be denied at runtime? Does the application attempt to exploit potential implementation defects to countermand security controls? If signed, then does the application contain valid forms of all necessary security messages (digests, signatures, certificates, permission request files, etc.)?
• Efficiency. Is the resource or part of the resource going to be ignored upon execution? Eliminating these issues can make your application more efficient to transmit and execute. For example, a text chunk in a PNG image will be ignored under OCAP 1.0 so that chunk could be safely removed from the file.

• GEM-based applications (including CableLabs OCAP, ATSC ACAP, JSR-242 and DVB MHP)
• CableLabs Enhanced TV (ETV)

XAV can be integrated with the MSOs Application Server to implement MSO policies regarding the execution of applications. XAV application audit records can help the Application Server determine:

• whether an application is allowed to run or not
• whether an application is allowed to be granted permission to perform a privileged operation
• what priority to assign to an application

XAV can also be integrated with an authoring tool by programmatically accessing XAV services in order to provide compliance and performance testing during the application development and authoring process.

For GEM application development, XAV's Platform Reference reporting assists by analyzing and reporting on Java platform usage in varying levels of detail.