Introduction and Overview

Demystifying XML

• Surveying the XML landscape
• The business benefits of XML

XML in the real world

• Exchanging data with XML: RSS, Ajax, Web Services
• XML best practices

Designing and Implementing XML Documents

XML document structure

• The document root and prologue
• Elements
• Attributes
• Entities
• Namespaces
• Differentiating between well-formed and valid documents
• Exploiting popular XML editing tools

XML design and data mapping

• Elements vs. attributes
• Design techniques
• Designing an XML document from a requirements document

Distinguishing dialects with namespaces

• Adhering to proper naming conventions
• Eliminating document ambiguity with namespaces
• Defining namespaces using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)

Generating and Updating XML Documents

The XML processing models

• Document Object Model
• Event-driven processing
• Navigating a document with XPath
• Querying a document with XQuery
• Differences between event-driven and tree-based models

Communicating with databases using XML

• Database storage options
• Retrieving database results as XML
• Reformatting database results with XQuery
• Storing XML with a native XML data type

Processing information with the DOM

• Navigating XML documents
• Extracting and modifying data
• Building XML documents from scratch
• Creating element and text nodes

Validating XML Data

Constraining XML structure and content

• Defining an XML structure with Document Type Definitions (DTDs)
• Building XML schemas to validate XML structure and data

Validation with XML schemas

• XML schema syntax and components
• Writing schemas to restrict XML content
• Specifying valid elements and attributes
• Encapsulating business rules in XML schemas
• Leveraging schema data types

Extending schemas

• Importing existing schemas
• Leveraging modular schemas
• Defining custom user-defined types

Transforming Documents with Extensible Style Language (XSL)

The power of XML transformation

• Converting XML documents to adhere to different schemas
• Processing documents with pattern matching
• Specifying output format with templates
• XSL best practices

Applying style to data

• Formatting XML data for presentation
• Styling XML for display as HTML and PDF

Searching and filtering with XPath

• Formatting and sequencing XML data
• Sorting, grouping and filtering output

Application Security and Integration

Securing XML applications

• Implementing transport security
• Encrypting XML data
• Enabling SOAP security with WS-Security

Integrating applications with XML

• Communicating with XML messaging
• Investigating Web Services, SOAP and WSDL
• Enabling an Ajax-powered Web page with XML