Online shopping has become commonplace, and users expect flexibility when working with a shopping cart. Find out how you can combine ASP and XML to provide the necessary functionality.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the adult entertainment industry is not developing its own dialect of Extensible Markup Language dubbed XXXML. Aside from that, it's hard to find an industry or interest that isn't taking advantage of the fast-growing standard for Web services and data exchange. In the six years since the main XML specification was first published, it's spawned hundreds of dialects, or schemas, benefiting everyone from butchers to bulldozer operators wishing to easily exchange information electronically.

The IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder is an application that constructs and renders graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Java Swing and Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) based upon a descriptive XML document. (Java Swing is a rich GUI toolkit included with Java that provides operating system-independent GUI components. Eclipse SWT is an add-on GUI toolkit that takes advantage of host operating system GUI components for maximum host integration.) IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder is both a specification for a mark-up language in which to describe GUIs and an engine for creating (and, if desired, rendering) them. This application can be used as a stand-alone application for testing and evaluating basic GUI layout and functionality, or it can be used as a library within the context of a Java application for creating and rendering GUIs for that application.

Visual Studio .NET makes developing Web services applications relatively easy, but debugging them is a different story. Learn how to debug your Web service apps using VS.NET. XML Web services are touted by Microsoft as the next big thing. But until recently, developers were hampered in their efforts to effectively develop them, placing the future of the new protocol in some doubt. Fortunately, Visual Studio .NET has made the development and consumption of Web services almost trivial, while making it possible—if not always simple—to debug them.

This article provides a simple method for creating valid XML and a simple DOM-like (Document Object Model) parser. This method is useful for small applications that need simple XML functionality without the size and complexity of the full range defined in the XML standards. The methods used to manage the XML data resemble those used to manage vectors, with the goal being to make the interface familiar and simple.

By using XML programming, Excel, Access, and Active Server Pages, one consultant automated a client's order entry process, cut the time the client had to spend rekeying data, and eliminated order entry errors. If your clients are like mine, the projects that really get their attention are those that eliminate repetitive tasks or save them time and money. If you can help them with all three, as I did on a recent engagement, you've likely endeared yourself to the client.

The United States government and the Semantic Web are a perfect match: imagine all of those senators and representatives, each query-able by age, party affiliation, bills proposed, committee membership, and voting record. For the last few years, I've wanted to collect as much data on the U.S. government as I could, convert it to RDF, and build a site and a web service that make it possible to explore that data. This will be my goal over the next year, and I'll document my progress here on XML.com.

The W3C is a curious beast. While moral in the sense that it evangelizes open standards and accessibility, it is strangely amoral in its obedience to member vendor whim and its insistence on the one true path of W3C-blessed technologies. Both of the topics I tackle this week are results in a way of that latter tendency. In this column I revisit the validation thread on XML-DEV, shaking the "one true way" assumptions on schema usage, and take a swipe at the latest SOAP specifications.

The way XML has been positioned over the last several years - namely, as some type of savior for companies that have invested in myriad systems with numerous incompatible data types - it makes you wonder why organizations aren't adopting any XML solution they can get their hands on.

Last month we looked at the REST interface to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and how an f parameter in a URL calling this interface can point to an XSLT stylesheet. If you set it to "xml" instead of pointing it at a stylesheet, Amazon returns data in formats that conform to either the "lite" or "heavy" DTDs (and corresponding schemas) included with their SDK; if you do, their server applies the stylesheet to that data at the server before returning the result to you.

One of my favorite B-movies is Back to School, starring Rodney Dangerfield. If you are unfamiliar with the movie, Dangerfield's character Thornton Mellon, a rich clothier for fat people, returns to college. Employing savvy business acumen to get through coursework and exams, he is charged with cheating on finals and is required to take an oral exam. When his love interest and English professor asks him to recite Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," Mellon recites the poem. Here is an approximation of the dialogue:

Bringing relational data into XML formats is a major task for many developers these days. XML has clear benefits as a lingua franca for integration, but it must co-exist with a well-established body of relational DB know-how.

Data modeling is fashionable. It used to be that all the effort that went into rationalizing software development was focused on code and routines. Of course, database developers worked on low-level DBMS models, but these never became prominent as a general way of looking at the data a business managed. This is because systems architecture and programming have always been in the spotlight more than database management.

An introduction to XML and DocBook: what is it and why should I learn yet another data format?

Brett's last column gave you a solid understanding of the JaxMe API. Build on your understanding as Brett continues by illustrating how to convert XML documents to Java class instances, manipulate the underlying XML data, and then convert the modified data back to XML. This article will give you a solid, working knowledge of JaxMe, and allow you to use it in your application programming.

Learn how XML standards help facilitate translation processes that involve many participants in different locations. This article focuses on the most common XML formats used in the localisation industry to show you how important XML is becoming in multilingual document exchange.

The effort among Atom supporters to create a standard XML syndication format took a new turn this week as the Web's leading standards body suggested a new route. The World Wide Web Consortium invited the Atom community to form a working group under its auspices, rather than within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Atom proponents since have been pursuing the formation of a working group in the IETF, a first step toward creating a formal standard.

The vacation season has brought renewed vigor in discussion among XML developers. A recent thread about validation illustrated one of the most useful properties of XML-DEV as a community: technical discussions often evolve to encompass the wider context of practice in which they are relevant.

In Part 1 of this article we looked at how XML can be scripted using Internet Explorer. In Part 2 we take a look at how the same application, a weather page, can be created using the XML capabilities in Flash. The resulting Flash page can be view by clicking here.

If you are up-to-date on XML features in RDBMSs, then you know that ASE, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server are leapfrogging each other in a race to add XML features to their relational databases. With each new release comes a new array of features. If I were to read a competitive analysis of the products, I'd have to ask what day it was written on in order to know which point release of each product is being covered. The products are changing that quickly.