Joshi - Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access

Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...113

Bipin Joshi 2017

Bipin Joshi Beginning XML with C# 7

1. Introducing XML and the .NET Framework

Bipin Joshi 1

(1)

301 Pitruchhaya, Thane, India

Over the years XML has emerged as one of the most important standards for data representation and transportation. No wonder that Microsoft has embraced it fully in the .NET Framework. This chapter provides an overview of what XML is and how it is related to the .NET Framework. Many of the topics discussed in this chapter might be already familiar to you. Nevertheless, I will cover them briefly here so as to form a common platform for further chapters. Specifically, this chapter covers the following:

• Features and benefits of XML
• Rules of XML grammar
• Brief introduction to allied technologies such as DTD, XML Schema, parsers, XSLT, and XPath
• Overview of the .NET Framework
• Use of XML in the .NET Framework
• Introduction to Visual Studio

If you find these concepts highly familiar, you may want to skip ahead to Chapter .

What Is XML?

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and is a markup language used to describe data. It offers a standardized way to represent textual data. Often the XML data is also referred to as an XML document. The XML data doesnt perform anything on its own; to process that data, you need to use a piece of software called a parser . Unlike Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) , which focuses on how to present data, XML focuses on how to represent data. XML consists of user-defined tags, which means you are free to define and use your own tags in an XML document.

XML was approved as a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in February 1998. Naturally, this very fact contributed a lot to such a wide acceptance and support for XML in the software industry.

Now that you have brief idea about XML, lets see a simple XML document, as illustrated in Listing .

Nancy Davolio

nancy@localhost

Steven Buchanan

steven@localhost

Listing 1-1.

A Simple XML Document

Many rules govern the creation of such XML documents. But we will save them for later discussion.

Benefits of XML

Why did XML become so popular? Well, this question has many answers, and I will present some of the important ones in this section.

XML Is an Industry Standard

As you learned previously, XML is a W3C recommendation. This means it is an industry standard governed by a vendor-independent body. History shows that vendor-specific proprietary standards dont get massive acceptance in the software industry. This non-acceptance affects overall cross-platform data sharing and integration. Being an industry standard has helped XML gain huge acceptance.

XML Is Self-Describing

XML documents are self-describing. Because of markup tags, they are more readable than, say, comma-separated values (CSV) files .

XML Is Extensible

Markup languages such as HTML have a fixed set of tags and attributesyou cannot add your own tags. XML, on the other hand, allows you to define your own markup tags.

XML Can Be Processed Easily

Traditionally, the CSV format was a common way to represent and transport data. However, to process such data, you need to know the exact location of the commas ( , ) or any other delimiter used. This makes reading and writing the document difficult. The problem becomes severe when you are dealing with a number of altogether different and unknown CSV files.

As I said earlier, XML documents can be processed by a piece of software called a parser. Because XML documents use markup tags, a parser can read them easily. Parsers are discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

XML Can Be Used to Easily Exchange Data

Integrating cross-platform and cross-vendor applications is always difficult and challenging. Exchanging data in heterogeneous systems is a key problem in such applications. Using XML as a data-exchange format makes your life easy. XML is an industry standard, so it has massive support, and almost all vendors support it in one way or another.

XML Can Be Used to Easily Share Data

The fact that XML is nothing but textual data ensures that it can be shared among heterogeneous systems. For example, how can the data generated by a Windows Forms application running on a Windows machine be accessible in a Java application running on a Unix box? XML is the answer.

XML Can Be Used to Create Specialized Vocabularies

As you already know, XML is an extensible standard. By using XML as a base, you can create your own vocabularies. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) , Wireless Markup Language (WML) , and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are some examples of specialized XML vocabularies.

XML-Driven Applications

Now that you know the features and benefits of XML, lets see what all these benefits mean to modern software systems.

Figure shows a traditional web-based application . The application consists of ASP.NET pages hosted on a web server. The client, in the form of a web browser, requests various web pages. On receiving the requests, the web server processes them and sends the response in the form of HTML content. This architecture sounds good at first glance, but suffers from several shortcomings:

• It considers only web browsers as clients.
• The response from the web server is always in HTML. That means a desktop-based application may not render this response at all.
• The data and presentation logic are tightly coupled. If we want to change the presentation of the same data, we need to make considerable changes.
• Tomorrow, if some other application wants to consume the same data, it cannot be shared easily.

Figure 1-1.

Classic architecture for developing applications

Now, lets see how XML can come to the rescue in such situations.

Note

For the sake of easy understanding the example discussed here is deliberately kept very simple and straightforward. In a more realistic case there could be one or more services involved that return the XML data. The applications then consume those services as and when required. You will learn how XML and services are related in later chapters.

Have a look at Figure , where there are multiple types of clients. One is a web browser, and the other is a desktop application. Both send requests to the server along with XML data (if any). The server processes the requests and sends back the data in XML format. The web browser applies a style sheet (discussed later) to the XML data to transform it into HTML markup. The desktop application, on the other hand, parses the data by using an XML parser (discussed later) and displays it in a grid. Much more flexible than the previous architecture, isnt it? The advantages of the new architecture are as follows:

• The application has multiple types of clients. It is not tied only to web browsers.
• There is loose coupling between the client and the processing logic.
• New types of clients can be added at any time without changing the processing logic on the server.

Next page

1234567...113

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access»

Look at similar books to Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Naik Swapnali Joshi

Think AI

Joshi

Practice CS Concepts with Scratch

Joshi Sunand T.

An H.P. Lovecraft encyclopedia

Alka Joshi

The Henna Artist

Kumar

Beginning Windows 8 Data Development Using C# and JavaScript

Bluttman Ken

Access Data Analysis Cookbook

Joshi

Evolution of the Weird Tale,

Haresh Joshi

Mohammed Rafi - His Voice, My Choice

Joshi

Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft

Ronald E. Day

Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

Sandeep Chanda

Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 Databases

Michael Schmalz

Integrating Excel and Access

Discussion, reviews of the book Beginning XML with C# 7: XML for configuration, documentation, and data access and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.