Detailed 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 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