To xml or not to xml.....

Cinquecento

I STILL don't get it - I've read countless articles about xml but can't see why I need to learn it. Let me outline a project - and perhaps one of you can tell me why it would be good to incorporate xml....

BTW - I use PHP/Mysql...

A WEBSITE PROJECT....
Users can browse a range of bikes - by type, cost, application, accessories..... When the choose a particular bike they are also shown a list of 'similar products' (they can change the category to 'spares for this bike' or 'bikes from the same manufacturer' etc....)

The current setup has 4 Mysql tables and a complex admin section to cross reference products.....

This is a bespoke site that won't have any other application outside of web delivery...

I don't quite understand how it works, but I guess I'd create XML documents dynamically and would have to get PHP to parse them into HTML/XHTML...

...but why should I bother - I'm already behind - I don't fully understand how to impliment it - and YET feel an irresistible pressure to take the step because of what I read and wanting to do a professional job - but still I can't see what benefit it would have to the end result??? I'm really confused!

Ian

Arc

I agree %100.. i've yet to see any reason to use XML at all... or any .NET products either. I keep hearing thow they are so great but no one seems to know exactly why they are so great.

thna_brianb

XML might not be right for that application, but I have definatey seen great uses for it. Dynamic site generation, SOAP requests, ect... I would agree that it is a bit convoluted at first, but once you get deep enough into it, you will start to see a very powerful/flexible tool to use. As far as the rest of .NET ... well that's another story.

IMHO

tomhath

I can give you a real world example of a good use of XML.

The company I work for sells software to home care agencies (Visiting Nurse Associations). Every visit by a caregiver has to be entered into our system so it can be entered into the patient's record and billed.

Some of the agencies use PDA's running software from another vendor that the caregivers use to record their visits; the agency wanted to import that visit data into our system. So we agreed on an XML schema to describe a visit. They wrote software to write the XML file, we wrote software to import the XML file.
While it's true that we could have defined some other special layout of a file for them to send us, everyone knows what an XML file looks like and how to write and parse them. Now, any other vendor we need to interface with can send an XML file using the same schema to interface visits into our system. Works like a charm.

Exchange of this type of information between disparate systems is a huge and expensive problem, XML has the potential to help:

http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlApplications.html