The purpose of this book is twofold: First to describe what needs to be done to internationalize XML documents and applications; second to describe how the XML data can be localized efficiently.
There is currently almost no information on these two topics grouped and organized in a single reference. In addition, while XML has evolved a lot the past 2 years, it has now reached a point of global acceptance, as evidenced by the many international XML working groups addressing trading partner agreements, electronic document exchange, business processes, and eBusiness.
This book is primarily a practical reference book for professional XSLT developers. It assumes no previous knowledge of the language, and many developers have used it as their first introduction to XSLT; however, it is not structured as a tutorial, and there are other books on XSLT that provide a gentler approach for beginners.
The book does assume a basic knowledge of XML, HTML, and the architecture of the Web, and it is written for experienced programmers. There’s no assumption that you know any particular language such as Java or Visual Basic, just that you recognize the concepts that all programming languages have in common.
The book is suitable both for XSLT 1.0 users upgrading to XSLT 2.0, and for newcomers to XSLT. The book is also equally suitable whether you work in the Java or .NET world.
As befits a reference book, a key aim is that the coverage should be comprehensive and authoritative. It is designed to give you all the details, not just an overview of the 20 percent of the language that most people use 80 percent of the time. It’s designed so that you will keep coming back to the book whenever you encounter new and challenging programming tasks, not as a book that you skim quickly and then leave on the shelf. If you like detail, you will enjoy this book; if not, you probably won’t.
But as well as giving the detail, this book aims to explain the concepts, in some depth. It’s therefore a book for people who not only want to use the language but who also want to understand it at a deep level.
The book aims to tell you everything you need to know about the XSLT 2.0 language. It gives equal weight to the things that are new in XSLT 2.0 and the things that were already present in version 1.0. The book is about the language, not about specific products. However, there are appendices about Saxon (the author’s own implementation of XSLT 2.0), about the Altova XSLT 2.0 implementation, and about the Java and Microsoft APIs for controlling XSLT transformations, which will no doubt be upgraded to handle XSLT 2.0 as well as 1.0. A third XSLT 2.0 processor, Gestalt, was released shortly before the book went to press, too late to describe it in any detail. But the experience of XSLT 1.0 is that there has been a very high level of interoperability between different XSLT processors, and if you can use one of them, then you can use them all.
In the previous edition we split XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 into separate volumes. The idea was that some readers might be interested in XPath alone. However, many bought the XSLT 2.0 book without its XPath companion and were left confused as a result; so this time, the material is back together. The XPath reference information is in self-contained chapters, so it should still be accessible when you use XPath in contexts other than XSLT.
The book does not cover XSL Formatting Objects, a big subject in its own right. Nor does it cover XML Schemas in any detail. If you want to use these important technologies in conjunction with XSLT, there are other books that do them justice.
This book contains twenty chapters and eight appendixes (the last of which is a glossary) organized into four parts. The following section outlines what you can find in each part, chapter, and appendix.
Part I: Foundations: The first part of the book covers essential concepts. You should read these before you start coding. If you ignore this advice, as most people do, then you read them when you get to that trough of despair when you find it impossible to make the language do anything but the most trivial tasks. XSLT is different from other languages, and to make it work for you, you need to understand how it was designed to be used.
Chapter 1: XSLT in Context: This chapter explains how XSLT fits into the big picture: how the language came into being and how it sits alongside other technologies. It also has a few simple coding examples to keep you alert.
Chapter 2: The XSLT Processing Model: This is about the architecture of an XSLT processor: the inputs, the outputs, and the data model. Understanding the data model is perhaps the most important thing that distinguishes an XSLT expert from an amateur; it may seem like information that you can’t use immediately, but it’s knowledge that will stop you making a lot of stupid mistakes.
Chapter 3: Stylesheet Structure: XSLT development is about writing stylesheets, and this chapter takes a bird’s eye view of what stylesheets look like. It explains the key concepts of rule-based programming using templates, and explains how to undertake programming-in-the-large by structuring your application using modules and pipelines.
Chapter 4: Stylesheets and Schemas: A key innovation in XSLT 2.0 is that stylesheets can take advantage of knowledge about the structure of your input and output documents, provided in the form of an XML Schema. This chapter provides a quick overview of XML Schema to describe its impact on XSLT development. Not everyone uses schemas, and you can skip this chapter if you fall into that category.
Chapter 5: The Type System: XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 offer strong typing as an alternative to the weak typing approach of the 1.0 languages. This means that you can declare the types of your variables, functions, and parameters, and use this information to get early warning of programming errors. This chapter explains the data types available and the mechanisms for creating user-defined types.
Part II: XSLT and XPath Reference: This section of the book contains reference material, organized in the hope that you can easily find what you need when you need it. It’s not designed for sequential reading, though you might well want to leaf through the pages to discover what’s there.
Chapter 6: XSLT Elements: This monster chapter lists all the XSLT elements you can use in a stylesheet, in alphabetical order, giving detailed rules for the syntax and semantics of each element, advice on usage, and examples. This is probably the part of the book you will use most frequently as you become an expert XSLT user. It’s a “no stone unturned” approach, based on the belief that as a professional developer you need to know what happens when the going gets tough, not just when the wind is in your direction.
Chapter 7: XPath Fundamentals: This chapter explains the basics of XPath: the low-level constructs such as literals, variables, and function calls. It also explains the context rules, which describe how the evaluation of XPath expressions depends on the XSLT processing context in which they appear.
Chapter 8: XPath: Operators on Items: XPath offers the usual range of operators for performing arithmetic, boolean comparison, and the like. However, these don’t always behave exactly as you would expect, so it’s worth reading this chapter to see what’s available and how it differs from the last language that you used.
Chapter 9: XPath: Path Expressions: Path expressions are what make XPath special; they enable you to navigate around the structure of an XML document. This chapter explains the syntax of path expressions, the 13 axes that you can use to locate the nodes that you need, and associated operators such as union, intersection, and difference.
Chapter 10: XPath: Sequence Expressions: Unlike XPath 1.0, in version 2.0 all values are sequences (singletons are just a special case). Some of the most important operators in XPath 2.0 are those that manipulate sequences, notably the «for» expression, which translates one sequence into another by applying a mapping.
Chapter 11: XPath: Type Expressions: The type system was explained in Chapter 5; this chapter explains the operations that you can use to take advantage of types. This includes the «cast» operation which is used to convert values from one type to another.A big part of this chapter is devoted to the detailed rules for how these conversions are done.
Chapter 12: XSLT Patterns: This chapter returns from XPath to a subject that’s specific to XSLT. Patterns are used to define template rules, the essence of XSLT’s rule-based programming approach. The reason for explaining them now is that the syntax and semantics of patterns depends strongly on the corresponding rules for XPath expressions.
Chapter 13: The Function Library: XPath 2.0 includes a library of functions that can be called from any XPath expression; XSLT 2.0 extends this with some additional functions that are available only when XPath is used within XSLT. The library has grown immensely since XPath 1.0. This chapter provides a single alphabetical reference for all these functions.
Chapter 14: Regular Expressions: Processing of text is an area where XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are much more powerful than version 1.0, and this is largely through the use of constructs that exploit regular expressions. If you’re familiar with regexes from languages such as Perl, this chapter tells you how XPath regular expressions differ. If you’re new to the subject, it explains it from first principles.
Chapter 15: Serialization: Serialization in XSLT means the ability to generate a textual XML document from the tree structure that’s manipulated by a stylesheet. This isn’t part of XSLT processing proper, so (following W3C’s lead) it’s separated it into its own chapter. You can control serialization from the stylesheet using an declaration, but many products also allow you to control it directly via an API.
Part III: Exploitation: The final section of the book is advice and guidance on how to take advantage of XSLT to write real applications. It’s intended to make you not just a competent XSLT coder, but a competent designer too. The best way of learning is by studying the work of others, so the emphasis here...
Publisher:
Wrox
Author:
Michael Kay
Release Date: 2008-05-05
ISBN/EAN: 0470192747 / 9780470192740
A combination primer and reference manual specific to Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, IE5 Dynamic HTML Programmer's Reference is a very useful companion for Web coders. The first half of this title presents dynamic HTML (DHTML) rapidly yet thoroughly. The rear of the book comprises a series of reference tables and listings that form a quite comprehensive repository of coding information.
The book begins with an overview of DHTML, followed by a look at how style sheets let you assert much greater control over your pages than plain HTML. The authors then explain the Dynamic HTML Browser Object Model and the Dynamic HTML Document Object in depth, pointing out along the way how each provides control over page and element levels. With this background covered, the book then moves into dynamic techniques such as event handling, scripting, and manipulating page elements. The first part concludes with a useful discussion of data binding and a quick introduction to Extensible Markup Language (XML).
The reference portion of the book includes a formal specification for the Browser Object Model, as well as DHTML properties, methods, and events. Next comes a full listing of DHTML tags with syntax specifications and code examples. This section doesn't stop with DHTML, however. It also includes tutorials for VBScript, JScript, and special character tables, making this book a well-rounded tool. --Stephen W Plain
Publisher:
Peer Information Inc.
Authors:
Brian Francis, Alex Homer, Chris Ullman
Release Date: 1999-02-18
ISBN/EAN: 1861001746 / 9781861001740
In Microsoft's Office 2003, users experience the merger of the power of the classic Office suite of applications with the fluidity of data exchange inherent in XML. With XML at its heart, the new version of Microsoft's desktop suite liberates the information stored in millions of documents created with Office software over the past fifteen years, making it available to a wide variety of programs. Office 2003 XML offers an in-depth exploration of the relationship between XML and Office 2003, examining how the various products in the Office suite both produce and consume XML. Developers will learn how they can connect Microsoft Office to others systems, while power users will learn to create and analyze XML documents using familiar Office tools. The book begins with an overview of the XML features included in the various Office 2003 components, and explores in detail how Word, Excel, and Access interact with XML. This book covers both the user interface side, creating interfaces so that users can comfortably (and even unknowingly) work with XML, and the back end, exposing Office information to other processes. It also looks at Microsoft's new InfoPath application and how it fits with the rest of Office. Finally, the book's appendices introduce various XML technologies that may be useful in working with Office, including XSLT, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, and SOAP. Office 2003 XML provides quick and clear guidance to a anyone who needs to import or export information from Office documents into other systems. Both XML programmers and Office power will learn how to get the most from this powerful new intersection between Office 2003 and XML.
Publisher:
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors:
Simon St. Laurent, Evan Lenz, Mary Mc Rae
Release Date: 2004-05-28
ISBN/EAN: 0596005385 / 9780596005382
ASP.NET allows web sites to display unique pages for each visitor rather than show the same static HTML pages. The release of ASP.NET 2.0 is a revolutionary leap forward in the area of web application development. It brings with it a wealth of new and exciting built-in functions that reduce the amount of code you'll need to write for even the most common applications.
With more than 50 new server controls, the number of classes inside ASP.NET 2.0 has more than doubled, and in many cases, the changes in this new version are dramatic. This book will alert you to every new feature and capability that ASP.NET 2.0 provides so that you'll be prepared to put these new technologies into action. Greatly expanded from the original best-selling Professional ASP.NET 2.0, this new special edition adds hundreds of pages of new coverage of advanced and new techniques relating to data and data sources, the provider model, personalization, membership, role management, localization, configuration, migration, and Altas.
Bonus CD-ROM and DVD * The bonus DVD includes a 180-day trial of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional * The accompanying CD-ROM features a valuable library of chapters from other key Wrox books. It contains more than 1,000 pages from more than 15 Wrox ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2005, VB 2005, .NET 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 books.
What you will learn from this book * The idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development * How to create templated ASP.NET pages using the new master page feature * Techniques for debugging and handling errors * How to work with data from enterprise databases including SQL Server 2005 and Oracle(r) * Ways to package and deploy ASP.NET applications * How to retrieve, update, and delete data quickly and logically * How to implement the cultures and regions features to localize your web site into multiple languages for different visitors * How to use the new "Altas" add-in for ASP.NET 2.0 to add Ajax-style capabilities to your ASP.NET applications * An understanding of how to use and extend the new pro?vider model for accessing data stores, processes, and more * How to keep track of your application's performance and health with new monitoring tools * When and how to migrate your ASP.NET 1.x applications to 2.0
Who this book is for
This book is for experienced programmers and developers who are looking to make the transition to ASP.NET 2.0.
Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.
This book is also available as part of the 5-book ASP.NET 2.0 Wrox Box (ISBN: 0-470-11757-5). This 5-book set includes:
Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition (ISBN: 0-470-04178-1)
ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (ISBN: 0764584642 )
Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management (ISBN: 0764596985)
Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control and Component Development (ISBN: 0471793507)
ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips (ISBN: 0764597663)
CD-ROM with more than 1000 pages of bonus chapters from 15 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server(TM) 2005 Wrox books
DVD with 180-day trial version of Microsoft(r) Visual Studio(r) 2005 Professional Edition
Publisher:
Wrox
Authors:
Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, Devin Rader, Farhan Muhammad, Srinivasa Sivakumar
Release Date: 2006-10-16
ISBN/EAN:
If you're using PHP 4, then chances are good that an upgrade to PHP 5 is in your future. The more you've heard about the exciting new features in PHP 5, the sooner that upgrade is probably going to be. Although an in-depth, soup-to-nuts reference guide to the language is good to have on hand, it's not the book an experienced PHP programmer needs to get started with the latest release. What you need is a lean and focused guide that answers your most pressing questions: what's new with the technology, what's different, and how do I make the best use of it? In other words, you need a copy of Upgrading to PHP 5.
This new book is targeted toward PHP developers who are already familiar with PHP 4. Rather than serve as a definitive guide to the entire language, the book zeroes in on PHP 5's new features, and covers these features definitively. You'll find a concise appraisal of the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5, a detailed look at what's new in this latest version, and you'll see how PHP 5 improves on PHP 4 code. See PHP 4 and PHP 5 code side-by-side, to learn how the new features make it easier to solve common PHP problems. Each new feature is shown in code, helping you understand why it's there, when to use it, and how it's better than PHP 4. Short, sample programs are included throughout the book.
Topics covered in Upgrading to PHP 5 include: The new set of robust object-oriented programming features An improved MySQL extension, supporting MySQL 4.1, prepared statements, and bound parameters Completely rewritten support for XML: DOM, XSLT, SAX, and SimpleXML Easy web services with SOAP SQLite, an embedded database library bundled with PHP 5 Cleaner error handling with exceptions Other new language features, such as iterators, streams, and more.
Upgrading to PHP 5 won't make you wade through information you've covered before. Written by Adam Trachtenberg, coauthor of the popular PHP Cookbook, this book will take you straight into the heart of all that's new in PHP 5. By the time you've finished, you'll know PHP 5 in practice as well as in theory.
Publisher:
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Author:
Adam Trachtenberg
Release Date: 2004-07
ISBN/EAN: 0596006365 / 9780596006365
Topics covered in this book include coverage of the .NET Foundation Classes that are most used by developers-ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET, as well as details about the construction of Web Services and how they programmatically communicate with each other
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors:
Jeffrey P. McManus, Chris Kinsman
Release Date: 2002-03-09
ISBN/EAN: 0672321319 / 9780672321313
* Covers all the most recent XML core and related specifications including XML 1.1, J2EE 1.4, Microsoft .NET's latest iteration, as well as open source XML items from the Apache project. * Strong coverage of XML use with databases, transactions, and XML security. * Discusses both Microsoft (.NET) and Sun (Java) programming integration with XML, an approach not taken in any other book. * Presents extensive business examples, including several major applications developed throughout the book. * No previous exposure to XML is assumed.
Publisher:
Wiley
Authors:
Brian Benz, John Durant, John Durant
Release Date: 2003-09-26
ISBN/EAN: 0764538292 / 9780764538292
The masters of XML show how to unleash the language's vast potential. Less complicated than SGML and more flexible than HTML, XML (Extensible Markup Language) is fast becoming the language of choice for Web developers and programmers. Readers are looking for a clear-cut roadmap to this new technology's exciting terrain—its advantages, capabilities, and little-known shortcuts. XML Specification Guide is what the Web world is waiting for. After a concise overview of the purpose and scope of XML and its principles, the authors—renowned XML experts—provide an in-depth, annotated specification guide, complete with sample applications. Beyond comprehensive coverage of the XML specification, the book discusses the new "namespaces" technology from W3C, the Tiny XML subset, databases and object-oriented models, and much more.
In XML Specification Guide, authors Ian S. Graham and Liam Quin don't attempt to reinvent the wheel by teaching XML in their own words. Instead, they present the actual 1.0 specification from the World Wide Web Consortium and enhance it with useful background information, definitions, and reference tables.
The book begins with a "bootstrap" tutorial that examines basic XML documents and offers an overview of Document Type Definitions (DTD). This section leads the reader through discussions of entities, DTD subsets, tokenized attribute types, CDATA, and string normalization--all of the tongue-twisting terms that make up the heart of XML. Plenty of code snippets illustrate the concepts, but the writing is aimed at a developer-level audience.
The second part of the book is the XML specification itself, buttressed with inserted notes, annotations, and a limited number of examples. Since you're reading from the actual standard, you can rest assured that you're getting the instruction right from the source.
The third section of the book presents a series of additional technical appendices that the authors feel are important. These include style issues, character sets, comparisons between HTML and XML, a discussion of schemas versus DTDs, and a glossary. Augmented by a companion Web site, this is a fine resource for any Web developer's desk. --Stephen W. Plain
Publisher:
John Wiley & Sons
Author:
Ian S. Graham
Release Date: 1999-01-25
ISBN/EAN: 0471327530 / 9780471327530
Completely updated for C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 platform, the new edition of this bestseller offers more than 250 code recipes to common and not-so-common problems that C# programmers face every day. Every recipe in the book has been reconsidered with more than a third of them rewritten to take advantage of new C# 3.0 features. If you prefer solutions you can use today to general C# language instruction, and quick answers to theory, this is your book. C# 3.0 Cookbook offers a new chapter on LINQ (language integrated query), plus two expanded chapters for recipes for extension methods, lambda functions, object initializers, new synchronization primitives and more. The new edition is also complemented by a public wiki, which not only includes all of the C# 2.0 recipes from the previous edition unchanged by the release of C# 3.0, but invites you to suggest better ways to solve those tasks. Here are some of topics covered: LINQ Numeric data types and Enumerations Strings and characters Classes and structures Generics Collections Exception handling Delegates, events, and lambda expressions Filesystem interactions Web site access XML usage (including LINQ to XML, XPath and XSLT) Networking Threading Data Structures & Algorithms Each recipe in the book includes tested code that you can download from oreilly.com and reuse in your own applications, and each one includes a detailed discussion of how and why the underling technology works. You don't have to be an experienced C# or .NET developer to use C# 3.0 Cookbook. You just have to be someone who wants to solve a problem now, without having to learn all the related theory first.
Publisher:
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors:
Jay Hilyard, Stephen Teilhet
Release Date: 2008-01-11
ISBN/EAN: 059651610X / 9780596516109
