Hiya

I have been running a website with PHP 4.3, MySQL3.23 under Linux and with Apache1.3.

What I want to do is to integrate the database content with other databases, or to extract some of their data into my pages... like what you have in expedia.com where you add the search criteria, this is then taken and searched through all the airlines websites around the world and the information is presented to you from other airlines in Expedia's website....

I am running MyPHPAdmin and it can export the data into an XML format...

Here are my queries... could someone please help so I may research this bit more...

1) How do I make MyPHPAdmin to produce the XML documents on the fly every time someone adds something to the database... or is this the wrong way to go about it....

2) I heard that a technology like SOAP can help, if it can how... are there any other technologies for this specific thing...

3) Are there any standards that the industry uses for XML documents to be linked and particular data to be extracted from each others database... e.g. if I wanted to take certain data from a database and this data was to be taken from many different tables within that main database...

4) Are there any modules, libraries and classes that I could download for MySQL, PHP or Apache that will make this possible for me...

5) Are there any commercial or open source software available in the market that will speed up this process for me... someone mentioned XMLSPY to me....

Please please help

Jo

    2) I heard that a technology like SOAP can help, if it can how... are there any other technologies for this specific thing...

    SOAP allows you to make functions of your application available for others to use in their software. It communicates over HTTP and uses a special XML syntax to encode function calls and return values.

    3) Are there any standards that the industry uses for XML documents to be linked and particular data to be extracted from each others database

    Two things here:
    1) The SOAP and XML-RPC encoding standards mentioned above. Also, the WSDL (web services description language) allows you to publish your SOAP interface so that other users can see what functions you have available. And similarly, if you want to use someone else's functions.
    2) There are a number of meta-data encoding standards (Dublin Core etc.) which use RDF (resource description framework) to describe data in a stanardised manner.

    Writing and consuming web services is quite an involved subject and probably beyond the scope of this thread. Also, RDF and meta data standard are quite new technologies and haven't really settled into mature implementations yet.

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