Professional XML Schemas [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Jon Duckett (Author), Nik Ozu (Author), Kevin Williams (Author), Stephen Mohr (Author), Kurt Cagle (Author), Oliver Griffin (Author), Francis Norton (Author), Ian Stokes-Rees (Author), Jeni Tennison (Author)

Book Description

Series: Programmer to Programmer | Publication Date: July 2001

In order to leverage XML's power as a self-describing and extensible language, we need a way to define and describe the allowable content of any type of XML document. In the past, this has been achieved with DTDs, but these have in many ways fallen short of the requirements for working with data. XML Schemas were created to provide a more powerful and flexible mechanism for describing permissible document structures using XML syntax. They provide a set of built-in datatypes, which can mimic the object-oriented mechanisms of many languages, offer support for namespaces, and facilities for automated documentation.

Professional XML Schemas exhaustively details the W3C XML Schema language, and teaches the new syntax in an intuitive and logical way. From declaring elements and attributes, creating complex content models, and working with multiple namespaces, you'll move on to see how XML Schemas are used in real-world situations. A number of practical case studies will illustrate the design and creation of schemas in the diverse worlds of relational databases, document management, and e-commerce applications.

This book covers:
A complete guide to XML Schema Syntax
Using XML Schema built-in types, and deriving new types
Working with XML Schemas and namespaces
Creating identity and uniqueness constraints
Good XML Schema design, illustrated in a number of different areas
Working with XML Schemas and XSLT
Writing XML Schemas for working with SOAP
Integrating Schematron and XML Schemas

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Suitable for virtually any XML designer or developer, Professional XML Schemas provides a challenging, in-depth guide to state-of-the-art XML Schema tools and techniques. This title will likely be a virtual must-have for anyone working with XML for databases or document management.

The range of topics presented here helps make this title a success. While there is some leading-edge (and somewhat obscure) material on emerging topics in XML Schemas, much of the book avoids XML "language lawyering" and concentrates on delivering a solid tour of the basics. The authors walk before they run, taking the reader along with basic XML Schema constructs to define simple data types in XML. They show off elements, attributes, and simple data types. (There's coverage of the full complement of over two dozen built-in XML Schema data types for numerical, string, date, and IDREFs.) The earlier sections include the author's own sample classes for a handful of common data types for such common entities as people's names, countries, IP addresses and URIs, plus geographical locations. Fully internationalized, these samples can serve as a basis for entities in your custom projects.

The second half of the book digs into design strategies at a higher level, dealing more with XML Schemas. The authors cover several reusable design strategies for creating workable XML Schemas (like the Russian Doll, the Slice, and finally the Venetian Blind model, which blends the first two). There's discussion of the best ways to express required and optional elements, along with choice values and ordering of required elements. Integration with XML namespaces and a discussion of the issues surrounding reuse in XML Schemas (like combining and extending existing datatypes) show how powerful this standard really is.

Valuable chapters on using XML Schemas with databases (including expressing relational integrity and normalization), plus the differences between XML Schemas used for document management will help you make the right design choices in each setting. The book closes with a discussion and tour of late-breaking tools like Schematron (and its competitors) as well as the possibilities for functional programming with XML Schema in schema-based programming (SBP).

Whether you are an XML novice or expert, this text will extend the range of what you can accomplish with XML Schemas, from creating more reusable datatypes to reusing existing schemas. While XML Schemas will perhaps never be as simple as using DTDs, this book succeeds at putting this new standard into reach for any working developer or designer. --Richard Dragan

From the Publisher

This book has been selected by the editors of Wrox Press to be part of the Wroxbase website.

Any experienced XML developer who needs to get to grips with XML Schemas will value this book. Knowledge of other programming languages is not required, but an understanding of DTDs will come in handy.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 690 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (July 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861005474
• ISBN-13: 978-1861005472
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,192,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beware, this book is a mess!, September 13, 2001

By 

Marcelo J. Amaral (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional XML Schemas (Paperback)

I bought this book because I was looking for a updated reference on the recently released W3C XML Schema Recomendation, and there very few options available. Well, now I can see why. This book, although up to date, seems to have been written in a hurry, and suffers from the common rush diseases:
a) Wrox seems to be speeding the print process by getting several authors to write different sections of a book. The result is a book with a complete lack of unity, and a lot of repeated themes throughout the book. The bad writers end up tainting the good ones work.
b) It abounds in typos and revision errors. I have never before seen a so badly revised book in my life. Some words like "however", for example, are capitalized everywhere they appear!
c) It is also full of real misleading errors. The section on patterns and regular expressions is a complete disaster, with lots of incorrect examples, incomprehensible sentences and ill-designed tables.
The only reason for my two stars are the last chapters, which have good tips for schema design and explain how it relates to other XML stuff, like XSLT and Schematron. These are indeed valuable, and are the product of the good writers in (a). If you want a reliable tutorial/reference to XML Schema, however, get yourself another book.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best XML Schema book out there!, October 3, 2001

By 

Govy Munamala (Bayarea, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional XML Schemas (Paperback)

This is the best XML Schema book I have read in recent days. I am especially grateful for the comprehensive discussion on Namespaces and tricks and trades of managing multiple schemas. There were a lot of books addressing the XML Schemas but they just give a chapter or two for this otherwise important topic in XML world.

Most of the books I read in Stacys gave at the most couple of pages to discuss the Namespaces topic. However this book spent more than two chapters discussing this issue. The book also covers Design issues and best practices being discussed in XML-Dev.

An earlier review of this book talked about incorrect examples. Well, as a career programmer I just take the examples as examples. There might be some syntactic errors, which are easy to resolve. I guess the publisher provides a download link for the corrected examples. I know it's a drag to get these; nevertheless it's a solution.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Documents vs Data, December 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional XML Schemas (Paperback)

This book is worth the price for its discussion of modeling documents vs modeling data. Coming from the document world, I have found relational database types have a hard time understanding the "model" of a document schema. This book explains the document analysis process concisely, but clearly. If you work in a place that is trying to bring the document and database worlds closer together, this book is helpful.