Essential XML: Beyond MarkUp [Paperback]

Don Box (Author), Aaron Skonnard (Author), John Lam (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201709147 | ISBN-13: 978-0201709148 | Publication Date: July 23, 2000 | Edition: 1

XML holds out the promise of a universal and standard means of object/component communication that vastly reduces the need for reliance on competing ORB standards such as Enterprise JavaBeans, COM, and CORBA. In this book, Don Box covers every key issue, technology, and technique involved in using XML as the "ultimate translator" between disparate software components and environments. Essential XML starts by contrasting the XML approach to software interoperability with pre-XML practices, technologies, and methodologies, including COM, CORBA, and EJB. Next, it examines XML-based approaches to metadata, declarative and procedural programming through transformation, and programmatic interfaces -- showing how XML's platform, language and vendor independence -- and its accessibility -- make it a far more effective solution for software interoperability than any alternative. The book also contains detailed coverage of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an XML/HTTP-based protocol for accessing services, objects and servers in a platform-independent manner.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

XML is often treated as the next pop standard in markup, but seldom in depth as a set of software development specifications. Essential XML digs deep into XML, examining its capabilities as an underlying data-exchange format. This book is for serious software developers who are comfortable with technical terminology.

Right from the start, the book addresses XML as a data format and not a presentation mechanism. It is the belief of the authors that XML handcoding by humans will fade away as XML becomes increasingly a low-level standard for providing communication between applications. The entire book revolves around the XML Information Set (InfoSet), an XML specification that the authors feel is underexamined by most XML aficionados. The InfoSet defines XML documents in terms that are independent of syntax.

The opening section provides an overview to the InfoSet, albeit a very technical examination. There's little ramping up in this book--readers must be prepared to dig into the nitty-gritty right from the start. The text moves on to discuss programming XML via the DOM and SAX, as well as such key topics as transformations and navigation.

One of the book's strongest points is its examination of XML as a messaging technology for the software development market of the future. In a discussion of XML as an improvement over standard component models, the authors proclaim that, "as the software industry looks to XML as a solution to all problems short of world hunger, there is a tendency to reinvent the entire automobile and highway system in the process of reinventing the wheel."

Developers who are fluent in component programming and distributed object models will glean the most from this book. Casual XML implementers should look for a more introductory guide, but tool developers will find this title quite insightful in charting their XML course. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• XML Information Set (InfoSet)
• Simple API for XML Version 2 (SAX2)
• Document Object Model Level 2 (DOML2)
• Apache Xerces
• Microsoft XML
• Xpath
• Xpointer
• Xinclude
• Xbase
• XML Schemas
• XSLT
• XML as a software-integration technology

From the Author

The XML community is a community divided. On one side is the "document" camp; on the other side is the "data" camp. The document-centric view is that an XML document is an annotated text file that contains markup directives to control the formatting and presentation of the contained text. The data-centric view is that XML is but one of many representations of a typed value that software agents can use for data interchange and interoperability. Essential XML falls squarely in this latter camp. That stance may offend some readers; however, it is the authors' strong belief that the ratio of hand-authored XML to software-generated XML is in sharp decline. As a result, this book deemphasizes XML's role in document-centric systems and focuses on key topics, namely the XML Information Set (Infoset)and XML Schemas (XSD), which lay the foundation for data-centric systems. This book is intended to help traditional software developers understand how XML technologies fit int! o today's distributed application architectures.--Aaron Skonnard

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (July 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201709147
• ISBN-13: 978-0201709148
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,443,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for the Mensa crowd, January 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Essential XML: Beyond MarkUp (Paperback)

If you enjoy cuddling up with sentences such as:

"Element information items are fairly adaptable to representing arbitrary data structures, as one simply needs to build an isomorphism between the "native" data structure and a tree-oriented graph of elements and character data"

... then you'll enjoy this book immensely. Me - I'm too stupid and life's too short.

111 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very Disappointing, August 28, 2000

By 

J. Clark (Fairfax, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential XML: Beyond MarkUp (Paperback)

When I first heard of this book I was quite excited to get my hands on it. Don Box has authored or co-authored two of the best COM books out there (Essential COM and Effective COM). Aaron Skonnard writes excellent articles about XML for MSDN Magazine. How could this book fail to please? Well it does and it does so on several levels.

This is a 370 page book. 100 pages are devoted to various appendices. This would be fine if the appendices were useful, instead you get 50 pages devoted to a print-out of the XML Infoset Working Draft from the W3C, which in the author's own words "is hopelessly out of date". The text itself is very much in a philosophical vein and provides very few insights into XML and its uses.

There are also many, many errors throughout the text. Errors are of course understandable, but there is such a profusion of errors in some sections so as to make them almost unreadable (especially Chapter 3). The authors claim in the intro that a web site has been created to support this book. Well if you venture to this site you find a page with the single sentence "Thanks for buying the book!". How extremely helpful!

Save your money and instead buy one of the Wrox books on XML.

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Non-Essential XML, October 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Essential XML: Beyond MarkUp (Paperback)

The title of this book is very misleading. If someone wants to read what essential XML is - the essence of XML -, all they have to do is read the W3C recomendations a couple of times. These are freely available on the web. But a book entitled "Essential XML", if it is to be true its title, should elaborate on the W3C reccomendations only to the extent that these elaborations will be useful and meaningful to everbody. And this book is far from that.

This book is best suited for academics, writers, a small subset of application developers and/or people who have lots of time on their hands and are at loss as to what to read next. If the author was being honest, he would have called this book "The XML Infoset" and left it that. Those who are interested in this sub-topic would have then bought the book. But then, the author would not have been repayed as handsomely as he is presumably being payed now.

I fear that Mr. Box is cashing in on the "Guru" status he as (rightly) acquired with his COM/DCOM/MTS books and articles. His first COM book, "Essential COM" was more aptly titled than this one, in that it did describe the bare bones of COM. However, it shared some of the shortfallings as this book in that it made it's subject-matter unnecessarily abstract and academic. For academic, read "divorced from practical application". For all practical purposes, you always need to read another book after reading one of Mr Box's "essential" books.

I think the main reason "Essential COM" was such a runaway success is NOT that it was the best COM book, by any stretch of the imagination, but that it was the FIRST printed book which took COM seriously. Perhaps the author is trying to repeat this success with XML? If you ask me, he's taking XML way too seriously. By buying this book you're only going to encourage Mr Box to write more books like this one; now wouldn't that be a waste.

My advise: get a book thats more geared to the platform(s) you're developing for, and if you're interested in arcana then look up the W3C infoset stuff on the web. But hey, if you're a diehard Box fan, I guess you're gonna get this book anyway.