Introduction to XML Training

XML Course Outline

• Introduction and Overview

  • Surveying the XML landscape
  • The business benefits of XML
  • Exchanging data with XML: RSS, Ajax, Web Services

• Designing and Implementing XML Documents

  XML document structure

  • The document root and prologue
  • Elements
  • Attributes
  • Entities
  • Namespaces
  • Differentiating 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
  • Event-driven vs. 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/data

  Validation with XML schemas

  • XML schema syntax and components
  • Specifying valid elements and attributes
  • Encapsulating business rules in XML schemas
  • Leveraging schema datatypes

  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 schemas
  • Processing documents with pattern matching
  • Specifying output format with templates
  • XSL best practises

  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