XML How-To: Your Guide to XML & SOA

Each of our guides consists of a set of lessons describing how to accomplish a single type of task, such as generating an XML document or creating an XML schema.

Compared to the typical XML resource, we focus less on technical details and more on actually getting things done.

Our goal is to introduce you to the world of XML by providing useful, practical instruction rather than getting bogged down with minutia. We provide a free email "help desk" staffed by helpful volunteers. You can email them with your questions!

Send us an email and we will notify you when the site has new lessons.

15-Minute Primers: Check out the following collection of starter primers...

15 Minute Primer: XML
Before XML and similar languages came on the scene about ten years ago, most electronically accessible data was stored in "flat" files.

15-Minute Primer: XPath
XPath provides a convenient, standardized means of drawing a value (or a group of values) from an XML document. The basic concept is simple—take the concept of a path, as used in mechanisms and Web URLs, and apply it to XML.

15-Minute Primer: XPath Filters
One of the more sophisticated mechanisms available in XPath is the "filter." Filters are logical expressions that nodes must satisfy in order to be included in a result set. A filter is added to an XPath expression by placing it in brackets to the right of a path term. Filters typically employ logical operators acting upon an element's children. For instance, the expression.

Tutorials: Check out the following collection of practical lessons...

How To Create an XML Document the Easy Way
Authoring an XML document can be a slow, repetitive task, especially when it's done in code using DOM. Wouldn't it be nice if there were an easier way? Delve makes creating XML documents easy and simple, with no DOM manipulation or special characters to type.

How To Dynamically Generate an XML Document
Sometimes you want to create a number of different documents with the same basic format but different content. That is, the names of elements and attributes are the same from document to document, but the values of those elements and attributes vary.

How To Dynamically Generate XML Elements
When dealing with more sophisticated documents, it's often the case that we want dynamic content generation to occur at the level of the individual element. Tectonic enables this by allowing arguments to be passed into elements in the same way they can be passed into documents.

Read White Paper on Collabortive SOA Prototyping

Not sure exactly what the heck XML is?
Get started with this
excellent wikipedia article:
> Click Here!

Want to learn
the XML basics?
We recommend
great books like:
> "XML in a Nutshell"
> "XML Crash Course"

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