Customer Reviews

Delphi Developer's Guide to XML (Wordware Delphi Developer's Library)

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To start with the disturbing fact: This book is about XML, but not about XML as supported by Delphi 6. Or more specifically, it is about XML, but doesn't cover any of the new Delphi 6 BizSnap XML features (XML Programming, Data Binding Wizard or XML Mapper).

The book starts with a first part to introduce XML. In seven chapters, we learn about the history of XML (and XML vs. HTML), the XML syntax, the old DTD, XSLT, XLink, XPath and XPointer, and finally XML Schemas.

The second part of the book covers the Document Object Model - all about parsing an XML document. DOM is one of the two main approaches you can take when parsing XML. The other is SAX (Simple API for XML), which is covered in part three.

Part four is about Serving XML. This is mainly about viewing XML as data and not as documents. It describes a number of ways in which XML can be generated automatically, for example as text, from a database, using web modules (or InternetExpress), using DOM or SAX, and finally as MIDAS data packet.

The last part of the book covers a number of applications that make use of XML, like an electronic e-mail sender, a customised client and XML examination application (both a Windows client and a Web client). The final chapter of the book even covers SOAP, but not the way Delphi 6 supports SOAP. In fact, I would not use the techniques in this chapter as they are far more complex than the Delphi 6 support (although they do help you understand what's actually happening).

All in all, this is a good book with some detailed coverage of XML and some nice example applications. The first part gives a solid introduction to those without XML knowledge or experience. However, the main thing missing is the lack of real Delphi 6 BizSnap XML coverage (which makes the book "good" but not "very good").

This book is okay if you like the procedural way to get an overview of the major vendors for XML components. It assumes you know something already about websites and gives a good but (for beginners and intermediate readers) tough layed out protocol and implementation view.

My advice: pick an XML implementation that fits your environment, read the first chapters on the RFC stuff (how it should look) and pass right on to the chapter for your implementation. Reading all the chapters can be quite confusing.

I look at this book as a complete developer's review and it does help me understand how to program XML quite well, but more real-world examples would be welcome (there is one example in it, but in my opinion it does not cover extensive use of XML in larger environments).

This book is not a beginner's guide. You will feel helpful if you need some guides in XML programming with Delphi.