XML Problem Design Solution 2006

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for users new to XML who want to understand its potential uses. You may be a business manager or analyst needing to get some breadth of knowledge of XML to make informed deci­sions. You may be a business professional upon whom XML is encroaching and for whom XML is an unknown—a risk previously avoided and now found to be inescapable. A mitigating action is needed— you need to get a good cross section of different XML areas, but mostly you need to be conversant on the topic.

Perhaps you’re an English major looking for a job, a tech writer in a department converting to structured editorial process, an out-of-the-loop programmer who missed the first waves, a software configuration manager with rusty skills, a web monkey who knows only PHP and HTML tag soup, an executive with­out enough understanding of where the man-hours are going, a corporate staffer in charge of training who needs training materials for your team—whoever you are, this book will help you grasp the con­cepts of XML markup, and lead you to problems solved in practice using XML capabilities.

Introduction

If you’re reading this, you are likely ready to work with the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and are seeking some direction.

This book provides information about XML and the issues involved in designing XML-based solutions for business problems. It does so in a case-study format, with each chapter taking one part of the single, main project, and leading you through the design of a solution for that, so that by the end of the book, you will understand every aspect of using XML to design business solutions.

After a broad-stroke introduction to XML technologies, the book surveys solutions to typical business and technology needs that are best solved using XML. You’ll tackle XML markup—more specifically, the kind of markup that you find “under the hood” of everyday applications and web services. Commonly available resources are used to show you the fundamentals of what XML markup is, how to get at valu­able information through these resources, and how to begin providing valuable information to others through XML. The book thus emphasizes the fundamentals of structured markup, and uses commodity technologies such as XSLT and scripting to build working examples. Discussion of XML Schema lan­guages is limited to comparing and contrasting the major approaches within the framework of the work­ing example.

This book is a nuts-and-bolts guide to help you leverage XML applications, some of which you didn’t even know you had. It covers XML 1.0, and related technologies such as XSLT, XQuery and XPath. The focus of the examples is on use of XML to share information across the enterprise.

An XML primer helps novice users get off to a quick start. Readers then move into sections of increasing depth, each developing a more advanced treatment of XML than the one before. Readers who have some familiarity with the material are welcome to dive right in to a section to consider specific XML applica­tion scenarios.

How This Book Is Structured

The first three chapters present an introduction to XML concepts. Chapter 1 provides an XML primer to get you going and an overview of the problem of sharing XML data with a partner. The projects in this book all involve your new winery.

Chapter 2 is an exploration of well-formed and valid XML, with discussions of the plan for validating the winery data. By the end of this section, the information model will be refined for moving forward.

Chapter 3 covers creating and distributing the refined structure so that others—internal and external— can use the winery data.

The next four chapters provide you with a firm foundation in presenting and publishing techniques. In Chapter 4, you begin presenting XML, styling it for browser presentation. You can follow the examples to produce a display on your own computer.

Chapter 5 looks at stylesheets further and provides data on converting XML content online using the XML transformation language, XSLT.

Chapter 6 examines options for rendering XML to print. In this chapter you produce printable data sheets using the XSL-FO technology. XML-to-PDF is covered fairly extensively.

In Chapter 7, you shift to considering your audience and dealing with issues of branding and individu­alized publishing. You explore data manipulation, sorting, and retrieval.

Chapters 8-10 arm you with operational tactics. Chapter 8 instructs you on searching and merging XML documents, and also covers XQuery

In Chapter 9 you examine XML integration with other business data, tackling issues of relational data and databases.

Chapter 10 looks at different strategies for transforming XML documents and provides examples for transforming common business documents

The last four chapters focus on business integration strategies, starting with Chapter 11, which takes on web services. You learn some common needs of accessing web services and incorporating RSS feeds into your web site.

Chapter 12 explains how you can provide web services to those who want to access your winery catalog.

Then, in Chapter 13, you examine strategies and data merge points for combining XML documents.

Finally, Chapter 14 shows you strategies for designing enterprise solutions using XML, workflow engines, and business process management systems.

In addition, there are three appendixes and a glossary to help you through the learning process. Appendix A describes the tools for working with XML, Appendix B provides additional readings that may interest you, and Appendix C presents XML resources and links that may be of help to you.
What You Need to Use This Book

To use the basic principles of design and work with XML, you need a text-editing tool. As you do more with your XML, you may need a database, additional editing tools, file management tools, parsers, and more. Different software tools are used throughout this book. These are described in Appendix A.
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