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XML Education: Online courses
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XML Education for Programmers
Doug Tidwell
IBM XML Technical Strategy Group, TaskGuide Development
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Building an XML application
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One of the main tasks in creating an XML application is writing a
Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD lets us define the different pieces of
data we plan to model, along with the relationships between them. The ability to
include this semantic information is the source of XML's power, and its main
advantage over HTML. In this article, we'll build a DTD as the first step in building
an XML application; future articles will expand on this work.
In this paper, we'll discuss how to generate XML-tagged data from a data
store. In our examples here, we'll be using IBM DB2 for Windows NT as our data
store. Unlike the previous paper, in which we produced a DTD, in this paper we'll
focus on building Java code. Although you could certainly build this application
with other languages, we'll use Java here for portability's sake. We'll also discuss
all of the parts of our Java code, even though there are tools (most notably IBM
VisualAge for Java and IBM WebSphere Studio) that could generate this code for us.
In this paper, we'll take the XML document we generated in the previous
paper and parse it into a DOM tree. Building a DOM tree is typically the first step
in processing an XML document. Once the DOM tree is built, we'll look at the
information in it and convert it into HTML. The DOM tree is a very useful data
structure that allows us to manipulate the contents of the XML document. This
paper focuses on building the tree, navigating through its contents, and generating
HTML based on the nodes in the tree.
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