Difference between XML ...?

[2939195631902]

What exactly does XML do?

everyone tells me XML is used to structure and describe information. ON the lynda website, it shows how xml is used to build a business card.

However, if this is all xml do, then why learn it at all?
After all, PHP with mysql and php oriented object will do the same thing.

[Capo64]

It's more of a universal way to communicate through programming languages. You can parse XML with a PHP object and get information from it. If you are making an application for your own server, I would just use a database, sessions, or cookies to store your information, but many other services use XML to communicate, so it's important to know how to generate and parse it.

I was thinking the same thing as you for a while, and I don't use it unless I absolutely have to (I have to send credit card requests in XML format to the credit card terminal I use--that's the only time I use it).

[juust]

xml is better suited to send structured data (tables) between servers,
but I figure the clue about xml is xml-rpc.

With xml-rpc (remote procedure calls) you send a whole function call (with the data you normally pass with parameters) between packages, and can build online peer to peer or remote control networks. The libraries are open-source and have little or no dependencies.

I heard windows7 has xml-rpc integrated in the windows api, so you can build applications on lan/desktop and have em communicate with internet services (without the browser). iPhone and Wordpress hooked up recently, and now you can blog from your iPhone (photo blogging).

xml-rpc might become big business the next few years, especially if as website you want to offer accessibility and connectivity for mobile phones and desktop applications.

[Boogle]

You must know XML to be a good cross-compatible developer. Especially if you use databases. No big company I have worked with have NOT used XML. They ALL use it! it's fast, universal, small in memory and is so robust it's unbelievable. XML is the way forward for all communications...

As Capo said, all monetary transactions are communicated with using XML, well all ther payment providers i've set-up before have been done with XML transactions.

Learn it!! XML Webservices is what you need to look at and understand!

Boog's

[Owen]

The thing about XML is that it lets you describe data in a pretty much universal format. You use XML all the time, for example, HTML is a form of XML, where the page content is defined in a structured format.

The usefulness of XML is pretty much taken for granted nowadays, but before it was around, you would use proprietary formats to communicate from one system to another, most of which was archaic and very few of those formats were human readable.

An appreciate of XML is important, though you may not need it right away if you're building simple applications. However, when you start talking about integrating different services, using AJAX or even generating HTML in a structured way, you need to start getting your hands dirty with XML. Luckily most languages today have XML parses built into them letting you quickly serialise classes into XML, or traverse XML nodes efficiently for example, which really cuts down on the time it takes to build things.

[Jasber]

PHP and XML are different things. XML is used to store data, much like a CSV file or a tab delimited file or an Excel file.

XML is just a convenient way to express web pages and certain types of data.