Top ten XML articles and tutorials - May 2008

The ten most popular articles and tutorials for this month were:

1. Simplify Ajax development with jQuery: Discover how easy Ajax and DOM scripting can be

   jQuery is a JavaScript library that helps simplify your JavaScript™ and Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) programming. Unlike similar JavaScript libraries, jQuery has a unique philosophy that allows you to express common complex code succinctly. Learn about the jQuery philosophy, discover its features and functions, perform some common Ajax tasks, and find out how to extend jQuery with plug-ins.

2. Learn 10 good XML usage habits: Improve your effectiveness and efficiency for working with XML

   Make your XML work easier with the ten tips in this article—ultimately you'll be less prone to errors and more productive.

3. A simple SOAP client: A general-purpose Java SOAP client

   This article describes a simple, general purpose SOAP client in Java that uses no specialized SOAP libraries. Instead of creating the SOAP request XML document for you under the hood, this client lets you create your own request with any XML editor (or text editor). Instead of merely giving you the remote method's return values, the client shows you the actual SOAP response XML document. The short Java program shows exactly what SOAP is all about: opening up an HTTP connection, sending the appropriate XML to invoke a remote method, and then reading the XML response returned by the server.

4. The Java XPath API: Querying XML from Java programs

   XPath expressions are much easier to write than detailed Document Object Model (DOM) navigation code. When you need to extract information from an XML document, the quickest and simplest way is to embed an XPath expression inside your Java™ program. Java 5 introduces the javax.xml.xpath package, an XML object-model independent library for querying documents with XPath.

5. Use the YouTube API with PHP: Process and integrate data from YouTube into your PHP application with PHP's SimpleXML extension

   The YouTube video sharing site allows Web application developers to access public content through its REST-based developer API. The SimpleXML extension in PHP is ideal for processing the XML feeds generated by this API and using them to build customized PHP applications. This article introduces the YouTube Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated video content; access video metadata, comments and responses; and perform keyword searches.

6. The 15-minute PHP-with-XML starter: Learn how PHP5 vastly improves your work with XML in PHP

   This first article of a three-part series introduces PHP5's XML implementation and helps those relatively new to using XML with PHP to read, parse, and manipulate, and write a short and uncomplicated XML file using the DOM and SimpleXML in a PHP environment.

7. Tip: Convert Excel data to XML: Extract data from the popular spreadsheet program

   Believe it or not, not every document is originally written in XML. In this tip, Benoit Marchal explains how to unlock data from Excel files to process them in XML, and examines the pros and cons of different solutions.

8. Planning a Semantic Web site: Prepare your site for structured data

   The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear. This article leads you through the aspects of both information architecture and general infrastructure you need in place to truly take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity.

9. Use XQuery from a Java environment: Search documents with XQuery from Java applications

   XML data format can be hard to search, but with the fairly recent introduction of the XQuery API, XML searches are now flexible and easy to perform. For Java™ programmers who work with XML documents using SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and more, the XQuery API for Java is a welcome addition to the programmer's toolkit. Now the power of XQuery is available to Java programmers without resorting to system calls or unwieldy APIs, all in a Sun-standardized package.

10. Tip: Convert from HTML to XML with HTML Tidy: Preserve legacy Web sites with this handy utility

    This tip demonstrates how to convert HTML documents to XML (or more specifically, XHTML) with a simple, open source tool, HTML Tidy. This conversion is useful for webmasters who are migrating to XML. It can also help XML converts who have to interface with legacy HTML tools.