Practical XML with Linux, Part 1
By Uche Ogbuji2003-08-22
Getting things done with the Extensible Markup Language
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In March, I wrote an article (see Resources later in this article) about the Extensible Markup Language and its affinity to Linux and the Linux way of doing things. Due to overwhelming reader feedback, we have decided to schedule a series of follow-up articles. In this article and others to follow, I'll take a closer look at some of the practical things you can do with XML.
Luckily for this purpose, the Linux community has taken to XML as well as I could have hoped. Many Linux development projects and languages use XML processors and libraries. The Cocoon project is building around Apache an XML-processing system that is, in at least one area, ahead of most commercial equivalents. KDE, the K Desktop Environment, uses XML as the native file format for its impressive KOffice. GNOME has an entire menagerie of XML tools, libraries, and applications, some part of the general releases and some strictly in CVS, the Concurrent Versions System. It is also nice to see that a trickle of apps -- mostly GNOME Toolkit apps using libxml -- are moving to XML-based config files, as I advocated in April.
In commercial space, both IBM's DB2 Universal Datavase 6.1 and Oracle 8i have come to Linux with an aggressive adoption of XML and many tools for XML document management, with IBM's WebSphere for Linux providing XML server tools, including a parser and data transformation tools. The other Universal DBMS engines for Linux are not far behind.
But there's no need for me to trot out a long list of the XML projects for Linux. A quick search of Freshmeat with keywords such as XML, DOM, and XSL will yield riches for XML newbies and gurus alike.
Tutorial Pages:
» Getting things done with the Extensible Markup Language
» What's new in tag land?
» Namespaces in XML
» The Document Object Model (DOM)
» XML Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
» Conclusion
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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