XML Format Changing

Milkshake

Loyal Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
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496
One of my profs got in touch with me at Uni today. Seemingly, he was quite impressed with my previous assignment work during the course of my uni career, and wondered if I'd be interested working with him on a bit of research next year .
Basically, he wanted to do some research on XML, both changing to and from the format into others.

Should I be all "Woo!", or is it something that's been done alot, or what? I've not much experience using XML, and don't know much about how widespread it is.

Any experiences?

Thanks :)
 

Shovel

Can't get enough of FH
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Dec 22, 2003
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1,350
XML is still pretty new. The spec has existed for a long time and it's becomming the first choice for data storage in small to medium sized apps (in situations where a full on relational database isn't a necessity, of course). iTunes uses an XML file for its music library, for example.

XPath (the current main query language for XML) is awesome and allows for the fancy real-time search filtering you get in iTunes, and there's a lot to be done with the technology that people haven't really discovered yet.

What your prof is talking about is the necessary step in moving old applications into this decade. You have a lot of applications (take Microsoft Office) which store data in messy, proprietry formats. Converting those to clean, well structured and designed XML is a difficult job (MS Office will promote XML versions of their file formats in Office 2006/7, but it looks like the old, locked down ones will still exist).

So yeah, there could well be a lot of potential for that project. It's worth asking him for some examples of what he has in mind, just to make sure he's not barking up some less interesting branch of the challenge. :)
 

xane

Fledgling Freddie
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Dec 22, 2003
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If you are getting into XML conversions, you might want to examine the DOM protocol/specification which is basically a way of representing XML in object orientated languages (C++, Java, COM+, etc), this also includes parsing XML (SAX) which is essential for conversion.

A bulk of information about XML and all the peripheral language concepts around it can be found at the Apache website, their main open source XML project is called Xerces and is available on several platforms.

http://xml.apache.org/
 

Milkshake

Loyal Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
496
Thanks guys, this is exactly the stuff and experience I was looking for.

Cheers much!
 

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