Professional Visual Basic 6 XML teaches XML theory and application for VB programmers with no previous XML experience. Following a complete introduction to XML concepts and syntax, you'll rapidly discover where and how you can take advantage of XML in your own applications, and how to create new and innovative applications that use XML to achieve powerful results.
The open, extensible and self-describing nature of XML makes it ideal for any situation where complex data is passed from one application or tier to another, or where data needs to be stored in a custom XML format. As a VB programmer you will quickly learn how to integrate XML with VB in a distributed object architecture. This includes storing and retrieving XML from a SQL Server database using a VB front-end, implementing XML linking using a VB component, and the integration of XML and VB applications in a SOAP/BizTalk/Oasis environment. You'll learn how to write your own XML editor in VB and how to transform XML documents to and from HTML and other text formats, including MS Word.
Professional Visual Basic 6 XML is ideal for any VB programmer who wants to learn how to take advantage of XML technology and the available (free-to-use) implementations.
XML is what programmers always wanted HTML to be. It enables documents to describe the data they contain. XML facilitates platform-independent data description and exchange, hence the interest among those designing distributed applications, e-commerce database and business-to-business programs. Though XML can be used with any programming language, this book is aimed at VB6 users. Non-VB programmers should look elsewhere to gain XML expertise.
Professional Visual Basic 6 XML splits neatly in two. It starts with XML elements and attributes, entities (in effect, boilerplate text) and other basics, such as cdata (unprocessed text). It then moves on to validation using DTDs (Document Type Definitions) and the more useful XML-based Schemas. Although DOM (Document Object Model) is, like XML, platform neutral this is the point where VB6 kicks in. If the first part looks at the XML specification, in the second part the authors segue into VB6 application development using XML as the data format. Here you'll discover how SOAP, BizTalk and Oasis work with VB6 and XML.
Building working applications is an excellent approach but in this case it also highlights some of the implementation issues designers have with what is still a relatively new technology. For example, problems handling large XML documents using DOM--which is memory intensive--and the necessity to drop back to the simpler but more flexible SAX to cope. Still, while necessarily a work in progress, Professional Visual Basic 6 XML is overall a much-needed look at an important technology. --Steve Patient
