On an average day, you probably work with files in a dozen different formats: plain text, log files, HTML, comma-separated files, colon-delimited files, various sorts of configuration files that have keys and values delimited in some quasi-standard way, completely binary formats, and the proprietary formats of your favorite set of “office” tools.
Unix comes with a whole suite of tools to make working with these various formats practical: head, tail, cat, cut, sed, etc. And if those won’t do the job, you can always pull out your favorite Swiss army knife: perl, python, or tcl.
Have you ever wished that there was a better way — a common, flexible format you could use to store all this information? Then you could write a single parser and a suite of applications to read, process, transform, and query all these various files in a uniform way. If you have, chances are that you want to look at XML.
In the larger world, XML has already been embraced by many of the worlds largest software companies (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sun) as well as some of today’s leading open source projects. See the XML in Open Source sidebar for more on this topic.
So if you’re new to XML, there is no better time than now to start learning.
What is XML?
XML is a standard way of describing structured information. The term “structured information” covers a broad spectrum of applications: business transactions, inter-process communication, electronic messages, database tables,…
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