Get started with InfoSphere MashupHub - XML tutorial

Category: XML tutorials > Development - Difficulty:

In this tutorial, selected XPath features are demonstrated with many examples and pictures which can be downloaded for off-line use.

Learn how well-formed XML messages can be stored in a DB2 pureXML database. Also, discover how a generic service layer can be created to enable access to the stored messages in a variety of ways by exposing a simple set of CRUD and Query services.

The Firefox browser is built using XUL, and the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release will provide a XUL runtime allowing any Firefox user to run any XUL application. In this tutorial, you'll start to program in XUL. You'll see how to leverage your Web development skills to build a XUL-based blog editor. The editor will provide some basic rich text editing, and allow you to save drafts locally that you can reload later for editing.

XSL is a more complex style sheet technology than CSS, so there is no way to thoroughly cover style sheets without things getting a little messy. Fortunately, as you learn in this tutorial, XSL is a technology that has considerably more to offer than CSS. XSL is designed to do a whole lot more than just format XML content for display purposes; it gives you the ability to completely transform XML documents. You learn in this tutorial how to transform XML documents into HTML documents that can be viewed in web browsers. Additionally, you should realize that the extra complexity in XSL is quite worth the learning curve because of its immense power and flexibility.

Although XML is certainly a great storage format for shuttling data around the Web, most web applications store their data in relational databases. Knowing this, it stands to reason that many web applications will end up accessing data from a database yet interacting with it and sharing it with other applications as XML data. This has a lot do with the fact that XML can be used not only as a document format, but also as a way to represent data in a highly structured manner. In this tutorial, you learn how relational databases work and how you can integrate your XML applications with relational databases. More specifically, you find out how to export database data as XML code, as well as how to make SQL queries on a database and format the results in XML.