XML technologies allow you to future-proof your Web sites and services. They ensure that data you are managing today can easily be adapted for future needs, allowing you to easily transform it into new data formats as they emerge, or build new services in order to accomplish new tasks with your existing data.
XML also serves as a common platform for the transmission and sharing of data between separate systems, allowing the rapid development of Web services that query, retrieve and share data among many sources.
XML is not just a universal data format; it is also a universal library of technologies (including XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, XQuery, DOM) for transforming documents between otherwise incompatible formats, presenting data in particular styles and formats, querying data from data sources, and manipulating data in a heirarchical, tree-like form. XML standards have been implemented in every major operating system and programming language, ensuring that one of your most important assets - your data - will always be accessible in the future.
- Create a full-blown Content Management System (CMS) based on XML.
Use XML-based data formats to manage the storage and management of all of your content. You'll see where the versatility of XML can make storage, retrieval and formatting of data much easier.
- Create a dynamic site map using XSLT.
XSLT allows you to transform your existing XML-based data into new formats and modify its structre. You'll learn how to generate a dynamically-updating site map from your existing XML data.
- Generate XML feeds (including RSS) for your Website.
Generate and serve error-free RSS feeds the easy way using PHP's XML generation capabilities.
- Set up XML-RPC Web services on your site.
Facilitate transfer of important information between disparate systems. XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) allows you to securely execute queries and functions on remote servers.
- Write portable XML documents that can be re-used across applications.
- Use XML namespaces to combine data formats in many ways.
- Use DTDs to strictly define the structure of your XML documents.
- Use XSLT to transform your existing data into other formats.
- Write XPath queries to retrieve data from an XML document.
- Use XML in conjunction with databases.
- Use the Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate documents.
- Rapidly process XML using PHP 5.0's built-in SimpleXML functionality.
- Use fast SAX parsers to read an XML document incrementally.