Why XML?, Why XML is used for?


 

Why XML?, Why XML is used for?

Understand why XML is used these days to develop applications.

Understand why XML is used these days to develop applications.

Why XML?

In this section we will understand the importance of XML and see Why XML is so important these days. We will also see the different usages of XML.

The XML is very simple language that allows the developers to store the structured data into XML files. There are various uses of the XML files.

Why XML is used?

We developers uses the XML files for following purposes:

  1. Storing the data for some application such as menu data or data for some comobox.
  2. For developing the database driven websites.
  3. In image gallery application is can work as the data file (xml) for storing the names and location of the images
  4. For shopping application it can be used to store the product details
  5. In travel applications XML data can be used to talk to booking gateway.
  6. On the web web services such as Weather services, Currency rates service etc. are using the XML language
  7. We developers can used the XML data files to generate the dynamic content by applying different Style sheets.
  8. XML is also used to develop the content management systems
  9. Many companies are using XML files to write the documents. Then programs like DocBook can be used to generate the required documents. 
  10. Database development with the XML is another good use of XML. You program can use the XML data file for business processing.
  11. Many software development frameworks is using XML files to store the configuration data for the application. For example JPA uses persistence.xml file for configuring the JPA environment.
  12. Many companies are using XML for electronic data exchanges
  13. XML is used to transport and the data on internet and between different programs
  14. XML is also used very easily where using database and flat files are difficult.
  15. XML is also used to create other languages MathXml, SVG etc.
  16. In XML there is total separation of XML data and style sheet.
  17. Many databases are providing the support for XML database

Why XML is so important in programming?

These days programming of almost all the technologies is using XML file to store the data or transport the data over the internet. With the help of XML you can send the data from your Java program to a .NET application and vice versa. XML is supported by PHP, Java, ASP, .NET, C, C++, Perl, Python and almost all the programming languages. XML parser API is used by the programmers to parse the data stored in XML file. XML parsers are available for all the programming languages, which makes the use of XML file very easy.

More XML technologies:

XQuery: XQuery is query language for XML.
XSL(T): XML Stylesheets is used to generate the html output from the XML data
XForms: XML Forms
XLink: XML defined Link
DTD: Is used to define the document type for the XML
XHTML: XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a family of XML markup languages for the web pages.

There are many uses of XML and the developers are using XML to develop next generation applications for their clients.

 

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