Free books for xml Tutorials

Most, if not all of the permanent topics of conversation on XML-DEV revolve around two camps of people: one which thinks aspect N of XML is a wart, the other which thinks N is an elegance. These threads never end because, in part, there is no final or absolute context within which XML is meant to be used. Whether you think of N as a wart or an elegance is context dependent and interest relative. It depends almost entirely on who you are and what you want Read the rest of this entry »

XML devotees are, as a general rule, thoughtful, creative, and a bit mischievous. So when the calendar rolls around to April 1, a safe bet is that you’ll find some interesting reading across not only the internet, but also on the XML-Dev mailing list. This year held no exception.I find that humor has an important place, even in otherwise serious discussions. Arguments that might be uncomfortable, uncharacteristic, exceedingly blunt, or previously discussed-to-death become more palatable wit Read the rest of this entry »

The show floor at XMLDevCon2000 was focused on improving existing technology, rather than creatingentirely new concepts. A few old tools improved their interfaces and schemasupport, and some common older practices received new and friendlier faceswhich may expose them to more and larger-scaled projects.XML Spy 3.5Altova showed off a preview of XML Spy 3.5, itsWindows-based integrated XML document, XML schema, and XSLT style sheeteditor.Alexander Falk, President of Altova, demonstrated the benef Read the rest of this entry »

After a short break, the XML-Deviant returned to find thatthe W3C XML Schema specification has finally reached ProposedRecommendation and that work on innovative alternative schemalanguages continues.Proposed RecommendationThe finish line is now in sight for the members of the W3C XMLSchemas Working Group. The XML Schema specifications are an importantstep closer to completion with their promotion to ProposedRecommendation status. All that remains now is for Tim Berners-Lee,as Director of the W Read the rest of this entry »

Most XML APIs are either event-based like SAX and XNI or tree-based APIslike DOM, JDOM, and dom4j. Most programmers find tree-based APIs to beeasier to use, but they are less efficient, especially when it comes tomemory usage. A typical in-memory tree is several times larger than thedocument it models. These APIs are normally not practical for documentslarger than a few megabytes in size or in memory-constrainedenvironments. In these situations, a streaming API such as SAX or XNI isnormally chos Read the rest of this entry »

As part of his work as the editor of the XSLT 2.0 specification,Michael Kay has been prototyping the new features of XSLT 2.0 and XPath2.0 in a separate development branch of his well-known Saxon XSLTprocessor. As I write this, his most recent prototype release is 7.4. (Hisrecommended stable implementation of XSLT 1.0 is at release 6.5.2; see theproject homepage for details onthe progress of these two branches.) 7.4 lets us play with many of XSLT2.0’s new features.The XSLT 2.0 specification is s Read the rest of this entry »

In my last article I covered the changes from version 7 to version 8 of the draft AtomAPI. Now the latest version of the AtomAPI is version 9 which adds support for SOAP. This change, and its impact on API implementers, will be covered in a future article. In this article I’m going to build a simple implementation of the AtomAPI.The first task at hand is to pick a viable candidate. I had a list of criteria which included working with a small code base, working in Python, Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, we’ll explore the TREX markup languagefor validating XML documents, focusing on validating a subset of XMLNews-Story MarkupLanguage. Although the XMLNews-Story markup language has beensuperseded by the News Industry TextFormat, we use the old version because it’s simple, it looks agreat deal like HTML, and it lets us easily show some of TREX’sfeatures.TREX’s author, James Clark, says,”A TREX pattern specifies a pattern for the structure and content of an XML document. A TREX pa Read the rest of this entry »

Open source computing has gained a tremendous degree of momentum in the last few years. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of web services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The Apache Foundation alone has more than 20 SOA/WS projects. One of the common obstacles for large enterprises to adopt open source solutions for key systems is the lack of administrative infrastructure and standardized glue for pulling together complementary projects. Essentially, the lack of a true open s Read the rest of this entry »

When the Gibbon or Thucydides of computer scientists sits down in 20 or 30 years towrite the history of markup technologies, an obvious periodizationwill fall out of the data, like the fall and rise of empires or theebb and flow of ancient wars. She will divide the world into the Eraof SGML and the Era of XML, neatly severing, as every historian iswont to do, the technical, social, and historical continuities whichmany of us call our professional lives.If she is very clever, she may recognize, a Read the rest of this entry »