No nonsense XML web development with PHP / by Thomas Myer.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A practical and concise book that teaches XML from the ground up. This tutorial style presents various XML methodologies and techniques in an easy to understand way, building a basis for further exploration.

XML is essentially an enabling technology, dry and boring on its own. As a result, most books on the market are dry, and academic in nature teaching theory rather than practice. This book actually teaches practical, real-world applications of XML, using the very latest version of PHP (PHP 5) as the base language .

No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP explains how XML can be put to use in real-world projects. The book also covers buzz topics such as RSS and Web Services.

From the Publisher

If ever there were a candidate for "Most Hyped Technology' it would be Extensible Markup Language (XML). 'No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP' cuts through the hype and shows you how to get the most of this powerful, multifaceted technology.

No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP dispenses with the theoretical possibilities of XML and presents real, practical uses of XML that you can apply to your existing Websites today. The book will teach you, step-by-step, exactly how to: Create a full-blown Content Management System (CMS) based on XML. Create a dynamic site map using XSLT. Generate XML feeds (including RSS) for your Website. Facilitate transfer of important information between disparate systems using XML-RPC Use the Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate documents. Rapidly process XML using PHP 5.0's built-in SimpleXML functionality. Unlike other dry, boring, theoretical writing on XML, this book doesn't cover the entire spectrum of XML technologies; it covers practical uses of XML that are useful to Web developers right now.



This book is designed to help you to get your feet (and perhaps your ankles, shins, and knees) wet with the topic of XML. You can instantly test out and apply the code examples provided in the book (and available for free download) to get a hands-on feel for the technology, and you'll gain the confidence to go out and build more.



The XML-powered content management system (CMS) that you'll build will be a complete, ready-to-use application. It draws on the author's experience of building XML-powered



Who Should Read This Book?

No-Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP is ideal for Web developers who want to discover what can be done using XML, whether they be experienced with PHP or relative newcomers. All that's needed to get started is a good understanding of HTML and some experience with PHP.

The book is written in the usual SitePoint style: it's clear and fun to read, with plenty of blocks of example code that you can apply immediately to your own Websites.

There's no need to re-type any of the code from the book. As always, all customers will receive instant download access to all the code and files used in the book so you can apply them immediately to your own projects.

What Slashdot.org Says...



"Kudos to the author for writing chapters on XML without sounding boring, redundant or too academic. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in developing PHP-driven Web sites that provide or consume Web services, work with XML data or generate XML for others to use."

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. ix)
• Who Should Read this Book? (p. x)
• What's in this Book? (p. x)
• The Book's Website (p. xii)
• The Code Archive (p. xii)
• Updates and Errata (p. xiii)
• The SitePoint Forums (p. xiii)
• The SitePoint Newsletters (p. xiii)
• Your Feedback (p. xiii)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiv)
• 1 Introduction to XML (p. 1)
• An Introduction to XML (p. 1)
• What is XML? (p. 2)
• Why Do We Need XML? (p. 2)
• A Closer Look at the XML Example (p. 6)
• Formatting Issues (p. 12)
• Well-Formedness and Validity (p. 13)
• Getting Your Hands Dirty (p. 14)
• Viewing Raw XML in Internet Explorer (p. 15)
• Viewing Raw XML in Firefox (p. 20)
• Options for Using a Validating Parser (p. 20)
• What if I Can't Get a Validating Parser? (p. 23)
• Starting Our CMS Project (p. 23)
• So... What's a Content Management System? (p. 23)
• Requirements Gathering (p. 24)
• Defining your Content Types (p. 28)
• Gathering Requirements for Content Display (p. 31)
• Gathering Requirements for the Administrative Tool (p. 32)
• Summary (p. 32)
• 2 XML in Practice (p. 33)
• Meet the Family (p. 33)
• A Closer Look at XHTML (p. 35)
• A Minimalist XHTML Example (p. 38)
• XML Namespaces (p. 39)
• Declaring Namespaces (p. 39)
• Placing Namespace Declarations in your XML Documents (p. 40)
• Using Default Namespaces (p. 41)
• Using CSS to Display XML In a Browser (p. 42)
• Getting to Know XSLT (p. 44)
• Your First XSLT Exercise (p. 44)
• Transforming XML into HTML (p. 50)
• Using XSLT to Transform XML into other XML (p. 52)
• Our CMS Project (p. 56)
• News (p. 56)
• Summary (p. 58)
• 3 DTDs for Consistency (p. 59)
• Consistency in XML (p. 59)
• What's the Big Deal About Consistency? (p. 60)
• DTDs (p. 61)
• Getting Our Hands Dirty (p. 69)
• Our First Case: A Corporate Memo (p. 70)
• Second Case: Using an External DTD for Memos (p. 76)
• Our CMS Project (p. 77)
• Reworking the Way we Track Author Information (p. 77)
• Assign DTDs to our Project Documents? (p. 79)
• Summary (p. 80)
• 4 Displaying XML in a Browser (p. 81)
• A Word on XPath (p. 81)
• A Practical XSLT Application (p. 83)
• A First Attempt at Formatting (p. 84)
• Using XPath to Discern Element Context (p. 87)
• Matching Attribute Values with XPath (p. 88)
• Using value-of to Extract Information (p. 90)
• Our CMS Project (p. 92)
• Why Start with the Display Side? (p. 93)
• Creating a Common Include File (p. 93)
• Creating a Search Widget Include File (p. 94)
• Building the Homepage (p. 94)
• Creating an Inner Page (p. 102)
• Summary (p. 104)
• 5 XSLT in Detail (p. 107)
• XPath (p. 107)
• Programmatic Aspects of XSLT (p. 110)
• Sorting (p. 110)
• Counting (p. 116)
• Numbering (p. 117)
• Conditional Processing (p. 121)
• Looping Through XML Data (p. 125)
• Our CMS Project (p. 126)
• Finishing our Search Engine (p. 127)
• Creating an XSLT-Powered Site Map (p. 130)
• Summary (p. 136)
• 6 Manipulating XML with JavaScript/DHTML (p. 137)
• Why Use Client-Side Scripting? (p. 137)
• Working with the DOM (p. 138)
• Loading Documents into Memory (p. 138)
• Accessing Different parts of the Document (p. 140)
• XSLT Processing with JavaScript (p. 142)
• Making our Test Script Cross-Browser Compatible (p. 146)
• Creating Dynamic Navigation (p. 151)
• Our CMS Project (p. 157)
• Assigning Content to Categories (p. 158)
• Retrieving Content by Category (p. 158)
• Summary (p. 161)
• 7 Manipulating XML with PHP (p. 163)
• Using SAX (p. 164)
• Creating Handlers (p. 166)
• Creating the Parser and Processing the XML (p. 167)
• Using DOM (p. 169)
• Creating a DOM Parser (p. 169)
• Retrieving Elements (p. 170)
• Creating Nodes (p. 173)
• Printing XML from DOM (p. 174)
• Using SimpleXML (p. 174)
• Loading XML Documents (p. 175)
• The XML Element Hierarchy (p. 176)
• XML Attribute Values (p. 178)
• XPath Queries (p. 179)
• Using SimpleXML to Update XML (p. 179)
• Fixing SimpleXML Shortcomings with DOM (p. 180)
• When to Use the Different Methods (p. 181)
• Our CMS Project (p. 181)
• The Login Page (p. 182)
• The Admin Index Page (p. 186)
• Working with Articles (p. 187)
• Summary (p. 197)
• 8 RSS and RDF (p. 199)
• What are RSS and RDF? (p. 199)
• What's the Big Deal? (p. 200)
• What Kind of Information Should be Featured in an RSS Feed? (p. 200)
• Before We Get Started (p. 201)
• Creating Your First Basic RSS Feed (p. 202)
• Telling the World about your Feed (p. 204)
• Going Beyond the Basics (p. 206)
• RDF and RSS 1.0 (p. 207)
• Adding Information with Dublin Core (p. 210)
• When to use RSS 1.0 (p. 211)
• Parsing RSS Feeds (p. 212)
• Parsing our Feed with SimpleXML (p. 213)
• Our CMS Project (p. 215)
• Creating an RSS Feed (p. 215)
• Summary (p. 219)
• 9 XML and Web Services (p. 221)
• What is a Web Service? (p. 221)
• What's the Big Deal? (p. 222)
• What are Web Services Good At? (p. 223)
• XML-RPC (p. 224)
• The XML-RPC Data Model (p. 225)
• XML-RPC Requests (p. 228)
• XML-RPC Responses (p. 230)
• What do we Use to Process XML-RPC? (p. 231)
• SOAP (p. 231)
• What we Haven't Covered (p. 233)
• Our CMS Project (p. 233)
• Building an XML-RPC Server (p. 234)
• Building an XML-RPC Client that Counts Articles (p. 239)
• Building an XML-RPC Client that Searches Articles (p. 241)
• Summary (p. 243)
• 10 XML and Databases (p. 245)
• XML and Databases (p. 245)
• Why use XML and Databases Together? (p. 246)
• Relational Database? Native XML Database? Somewhere in Between? (p. 246)
• Converting Relational Data to XML (p. 249)
• Using phpMyAdmin to Export XML (p. 249)
• Using mysqldump to Export XML (p. 251)
• Hand-Rolling an XML Converter (p. 253)
• Our CMS Project (p. 256)
• Building the MySQL Table (p. 256)
• Building the PHP (p. 257)
• Setting up a Cron Schedule to Run Periodically (p. 259)
• Summary (p. 260)
• A PHP XML Functions (p. 261)
• SAX Functions (p. 261)
• Error Code Constants (p. 261)
• Function Listing (p. 262)
• DOM Functions (p. 272)
• Object Listing (p. 272)
• Function Listing (p. 294)
• SimpleXML Functions (p. 294)
• Function Listing (p. 294)
• SimpleXMLElement Methods (p. 295)
• B CMS Administration Tool (p. 297)
• Picking Up Where We Left Off (p. 297)
• Managing Web Copy (p. 297)
• Web Copy Index Page (p. 299)
• Web Copy Creation Page (p. 301)
• New Web Copy Processing Script (p. 303)
• Web Copy Editing Page (p. 305)
• Web Copy Update Processing Script (p. 307)
• Web Copy Delete Processing Script (p. 308)
• Managing News Items (p. 309)
• News Item Index Page (p. 310)
• News Item Creation Page (p. 311)
• New News Item Processing Script (p. 312)
• News Item Editing Page (p. 314)
• News Item Update Processing Script (p. 316)
• News Item Delete Processing Script (p. 317)
• Managing Authors, Administrators, and Categories (p. 318)
• Managing Authors (p. 318)
• Managing Administrators (p. 327)
• Managing Categories (p. 331)
• Updating the Admin Index Page (p. 336)
• Summary (p. 337)
• Index (p. 339)