501.  Introduction to XML

Rev. 1.1

 

This course is now available directly from our partner, Capstone Courseware.

This one-day course introduces the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, including basic grammar and XML validation using DTDs or XML Schema.  Students learn to read and to hand-write XML well-formed XML documents, and then proceed to modeling concepts, first learning the basic DTD language and then studying namespaces and XML Schema.  The course closes with a chapter on important XML-related technology, including XPath, XSLT,  SAX or DOM parsing, and SOAP-based Web services.

 

The module presents what might be called “Pure XML” – by which we mean two things. Firstly, everything in the module is based strictly on W3C specifications, without any vendor-specific extensions. Secondly, no knowledge of any particular programming language or other external technology is required to participate fully in the module. Thus the hands-on exercises, and the knowledge that is developed, are portable and applicable to any XML authoring or development effort. (Separately, Object Innovations also offers courseware in XML and Java, for instance, and XML in the .NET framework.)

 

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

 

·         Understand the broad influence of XML on emerging software architectures.

·         Write well-formed XML documents to express simple or complex document content.

·         Write DTDs to set rules for XML document validation.

·         Write valid XML documents with internal and/or external document type definitions.

·         Understand the limitations of DTDs in expressing document and object designs and in setting strict validation rules.

·         Read and write XML using namespaces to import type information and to partition the XML namespace.

·         Use XML Schema to validate XML documents.

·         Understand the roles of XPath, XSLT, parsing, and Web services in the broader scope of XML technology in software applications.

 

Course Duration:  1 day

 

Prerequisites:  None. Some familiarity with HTML will be beneficial.

 

1.      A Brief History of XML

 

Birth of XML

Content vs. Presentation

Self-Describing Data

A Standard Document Format

Uses for XML

 

2.      XML Grammar

 

Structure of an XML Document

Handling Whitespace

Character and Entity References

Well-Formed XML

Elements

Attributes

Processing Instructions

Comments

CDATA Sections

 

3.      Valid XML

 

Document Types

DTD Structure

Defining Elements

Cardinality

Attributes

Required, Implied, Default, and Fixed Attributes

Enumerations

XML Namespaces

Limitations of DTDs

XML Schema

Advantages of XML Schema

Data Types

 

4.      Using XML in Applications

 

SAX and DOM Parsing

XSLT

XPath

XSL-FO

Web Services

SOAP

 

Learning Resources

 

System Requirements

 

Software for this course can be installed and run on Windows or Linux systems. A small package of XML parsers and a text editor is also required – these are free, downloadable tools. See the course Setup Guide for details.

 

Hardware requirements are not great; a good minimal system for this course would have a Pentium 200MHz or equivalent CPU, 64 meg of RAM and at least 50 megabytes of free disk space for tools installation (and most of this is for the Web browser).