clear picture of XML.

[Tracy Qi]

I am new to XML. After reading serveral books, I still fell puzzled about the postion of XML i n web. Here is the question:
As a very typical web applcaiton. I used DB, jsp , servlet. Where is the position of XML? Do i have to take all the data from DB and format the xml file on the fly? Or take XML file, parse it and insert into DB? All the books are talking about the parsing the data in XML using SAX, DOM. It's pretty tedious to do so. Anybody can give me a hint?
Thanks

[W. Scott Means]

I think this is a great question. A lot of people hear about how wonderful XML is, then they ask "But what can it do for me?"
The truth is, if you have a working system that meets all of your immediate needs, converting to XML will probably not help you at all. Fortunately for us development types, those pesky users always seem to want more functionality.
Moving to an XML-based infrastructure actually provides your system with a LOT of flexibility. For example, if all of the content from your web site is available through a series of XML documents, you could easily take the same content and generate printable (PDF), cell-phone (WML) or plain-text versions with very little effort. Right now, XML is still primarily a presentation format, not a data-update format.
As for the techniques to use, you can still use a lot of the same tools you used before. But instead of generating HTML documents, generate XML documents and transform them.
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W. Scott Means
author, Strategic XML
[e-mail]

[ruilin yang]

How good is XML now for generating pictures, such as to use it to draw graphs or enable a computer to have electric ink to draw things on screen and save it.
My question may be to wild, but please give some comments
Thanks
Ruilin

[Tracy Qi]

Thanks for your reply.
But seems generate the xml is very tedious. Maybe i am still lost here. Say I have 1000 items list on the web. Now using jsp, I just loop the recordset. If I need to transform the xm, is that means I need to format a xml file that include 1000 items on it which will use xsl to display? Also if somebody update the item, I have to do the same procedure again. That's very a burden on developer. Correct me if i am wrong.
Thanks again for the reply.

[Tiger Scott]

Generating XML should not be any more difficult than HTML. Yes the JSP class does it for you without any effort on your part. But XSL can be used to transform any XML to HTML.
HTH

[Tracy Qi]

thanks for the rely again.
Yes.I agree with you. usign XSL can greatly help formating HTML in the web development. But tasks to generate xml containg 1000+ items is pretty huge. Also this XML also need to be very templately. It has to be generate every times people try to view it. Since everytime it has to talk to DB to generate this xml file on the fly. Is there a good way to solve this problem?