Chapter 3: XML Technical Primer

Overview

Even if you develop applications daily, it can be quite a challenge to keep up with the constant changes in the technical industry. Between the programming languages, the tools you use to program, the methodologies, the best practices of those methodologies, new architectures, and design techniques, you are fortunate if you can maintain the mastery of your current areas, much less learn about the new entrants into these areas.

Since Web services will certainly touch developers who have been too busy developing more traditional applications over the last few years, I am going to summarize some of the newer technologies to enable you to follow the sample applications we will be designing later in the book. This is not a book about XML (eXtensible Markup Language) or schemas, so the intent is not to give you a complete understanding of each of these technologies, but rather to provide enough information to enable you to follow along through the remaining material in this book. If you are interested in gaining a deeper level of understanding in these technologies, quite a few books are available to assist you (and it seems that number grows on a weekly basis). If you consider yourself proficient in these technologies, you should be able to quickly review the high points I have listed and move on.

I will break this review into two chapters. This chapter will deal with building XML, both in building data documents and in giving them definitions. In the next chapter, we will look specifically at working with XML through methodologies and tools. Aside from getting a fundamental understanding of how to use XML, we will look at different approaches to accomplishing given tasks. This will be an important step in determining how to design our Web service applications.