What's the use of XML in real world project development?

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Guest

seems XML is used in SOAP for transfer information and used as config files
most time in dotnet. Where XML will be used in real project development?
 
XML (and related techonologies) is useful in situations in which
eterogenous applications need to share informations each other.
A real example i'm working right now: UE welfare organizations, 'til
now exchanged informations on their users, using a format called
Edifact (classic fixed lenght record text file) and according common
rules. Now they choosed to convert such documents to XML format because
the intrinsic xml self-describing features makes easier to share that
informations. The only thing the eterogenous applications needs to know
to share xml data is the "Dictionary" used to form such xml documents.
I'm not saying that this was impossible to do without XML, just XML
makes easier to do it.
 
There are a number of reasons XML was designed:
It is a common languague for applications to communicate with each other,
especially useful across platforms.
It's a standard for representing data.
There is a lot of articles on this. Using XML in config files is a very
small part of XML. XML is used in config files because it's easy to extract
data from XML, not like the old days with ini files and GetProfileString.

Hope this help,
Cheers
Mark
 
XML is used in all sorts of things, more every year. XHTML, for example, is
most probably going to replace HTML over the next 5 or so years. XML with
XSD (eXtensible Schema Definition) enables data of any sort to be stored in
XML. XSL (eXtensible StyleSheet Language) is used to transform XML into
virutally any document or data format you can imagine. Windows Vista, with
the Microsoft Presentation Foundation, includes XAML (eXtensible Application
Markup Language), which enables GUIs of all sorts to be written using XML.
..Net configuration files are written in XML. XML can be embedded in an HTML
document. Heaven knows, I've only scratched the surface of what *is* being
done with it. And only heaven knows what *will* be done with it in the
future. The key is the "X" - eXtensible. What can and will be done with it
is basically limited to the limits of your imagination.

You might want to visit one or more of the following web sites for more
information:

http://www.w3.org/XML/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
You can lead a fish to a bicycle,
but you can't make it stink.
 
XML (and the SOAP flavor in particular) can be credited with bringing
together the biggest players in the technosphere with a common
interoperabilty standard. Now, they can all say "Even though my platform is
way better than yours, we can still speak to each other using standards based
on XML".
That alone speaks volumes about XML, IMO.
Peter
 
Cutting to the chase, the places where XML is most useful:

1) when information needs to be shared between differen applications,
possibly on different platforms.
2) when it is useful for the information to be human-readable, and human
edittable without custom tools
3) when the information is more complex than simple name/view pairs.

--
Truth,
James Curran
[erstwhile VC++ MVP]

Home: www.noveltheory.com Work: www.njtheater.com
Blog: www.honestillusion.com Day Job: www.partsearch.com
 
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