Essential XML: Protocols and Component Software DevelopMentor: Amazon.co.uk: Don Box, Aaron Skonnard, John Lam: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

XML is often treated as the next pop standard in mark-up, but seldom in depth as a set of software development specifications. Essential XML digs deep into XML, examining its capabilities as an underlying data exchange format. This book is for serious software developers who are comfortable with technical terminology.

Right from the start, the book addresses XML as a data format and not a presentation mechanism. It is the belief of the authors that XML hand coding by humans will fade away as XML becomes increasingly a low-level standard for providing communication between applications. The entire book revolves around the XML Information Set (InfoSet), an XML specification that the authors feel is under-examined by most XML aficionados. The InfoSet defines XML documents in terms independent of syntax.

The opening section provides an overview to the InfoSet, albeit a very technical examination. There's little ramping up in this book--readers must be prepared to dig into the nitty-gritty right from the start. The text moves on to discuss programming XML via the DOM and SAX, as well as key topics like transformations and navigation.

One of the book's strongest points is its examination of XML as a messaging technology for the software development market of the future. In a discussion of XML as an improvement over standard component models, the authors proclaim, "as the software industry looks to XML as a solution to all problems short of world hunger, there is a tendency to reinvent the entire automobile and highway system in the process of reinventing the wheel".

Developers fluent in component programming and distributed object models will glean the most from this book. Casual XML implementers should look for a more introductory guide, but tool developers will find this title quite insightful in charting their XML course. --Stephen W. Plain, Amazon.com

Topics covered:

XML Information Set (InfoSet)
Simple API for XML Version 2 (SAX2)
Document Object Model Level 2 (DOML2)
Apache Xerces
Microsoft XML
Xpath
Xpointer
Xinclude
Xbase
XML Schemas
XSLT
XML as a software integration technology

Product Description

XML holds out the promise of a universal and standard means of object/component communication that vastly reduces the need for reliance on competing ORB standards such as Enterprise JavaBeans, COM, and CORBA. In this book, Don Box covers every key issue, technology, and technique involved in using XML as the "ultimate translator" between disparate software components and environments. Essential XML starts by contrasting the XML approach to software interoperability with pre-XML practices, technologies, and methodologies, including COM, CORBA, and EJB. Next, it examines XML-based approaches to metadata, declarative and procedural programming through transformation, and programmatic interfaces -- showing how XML's platform, language and vendor independence -- and its accessibility -- make it a far more effective solution for software interoperability than any alternative. The book also contains detailed coverage of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an XML/HTTP-based protocol for accessing services, objects and servers in a platform-independent manner.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Great help, well written 13 July 2007

By Another Programmer

Format:Paperback

XML is somewhat different from other standards, because it is very easy to understand XML on a basic level by simple examples, it is easy to write your first XML markup and implement a piece of code that processes it. However, XML, like any other technology, gets just as complex as you get deeper. Yes, most of the time you don't need the complexity, but sometimes you sorely do.

Most resources you will find on the web about XML do not dive into the details that you need from time to time. For instance, the sort of "quick tutorial by examples" will not help you at all when you need to implement something as complex as an XML editor, or need to dive into a document management standard like DITA, where you need to learn the concepts, terminology and dirty details of XML.

In such cases your last resort is to read the standard - not that appealing. In this case, there is a viable alternative: buy this book. The book tries to accomplish to serve both as a reference and a tutorial, and I think it succeeds quite well at this nearly impossibly task. The text is heavy duty, simply because it always uses - as far as I can tell - the correct term. There is a point of difficulty beyond you have to know what the difference is between a general parsed entity and a parameter entity.

It is also good that this book is not the kind which weighs 2 pounds, has immense amount of examples inside beautifully typed boxes with different background. The samples are minimal and always to the point. The diagrams are the type that you would put your bookmark on them had you bumped into them on the web.

In fact, this book is one of those books that one must have on their shelf. It explains the standard and the reason behind the wording of the standard, and pretty much everything you'll ever need to learn, although I am sure that if you wanted dive into, say, XSLT, there are books dealing with that only.

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Lots of detail but difficult to digest 12 Dec 2000

By A Customer

I bought this book as a beginner and up 'til now have found it very difficult to read. It goes into too much detail too early and uses language like "This independence allows disparate software agents to interoperate" which is fine until you realise the whole chapter reads like it! This book would benefit from a few more step by step examples. I'm sure the authors knew what they meant when they wrote it.

This may be a great book but I don't understand it yet. 4 Dec 2000

If you are new to XML as I am, don't buy this book... It launches straight into the internal structure of XML and currently has me baffled. It appears to be a reference for people who know XML well and want to apply it to software integration and design. To be fair the author's blurb does say as much...