XM211: XML for Developers & Web Services (3 days)

Course Overview

This workshop presents an overview of XML (the World-Wide Web Consortium's eXtensible Markup Language), and the standards-oriented XML-based technologies: SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol; WebServices; and UDDI, the Universal Description Discovery and Integration system.

XML is viewed as a key technology that is pushing the Internet 'forward' and enhancing its capacity to support e-commerce and foster a viable on-line marketplace. XML is not just about the Internet however, it has many applications in the wider business arena and is being touted as the standard infrastructure underlying next-generation middleware systems based on Web Services.

XML is also strongly supported by organizations such as IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle, Netscape, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Macromedia and Adobe and is finding its way into many of these organisations products and enterprise solutions. For example, Microsoft has incorporated support for XML into Internet Explorer, its Office product suites and hroughout its .NET infrastructure and server offerings. Various J2EE products and standards extensively overlap with the XML world. Content Management systems also typically offer varying degrees of XML support.

SOAP, WebServices and UDDI are new technologies that are fated to become ever more important as they slowly assume the role of underpinning major initiatives such as Microsoft's .NET and grow to provide the foundation for much of what Oracle, Sun, IBM, HP and the various members of the open source community are intending to provide for the next iteration of the Internet.

The detail of this part of the course covers SOAP which provides a simple and lightweight mechanism for exchanging structured and typed information between peers in a distributed, decentralised computing environment using XML messages.

Course Objectives

Participants will:

• Examine the concepts behind XML,
• Look at the standardization activity occurring in the XML community,
• Learn how to apply XML with particular reference to deploying XML on the World-Wide Web,
• Examine a number of XML-related technologies,
• Gain an understanding of how XML can be used to resolve many common data-exchange problems.
• Through various exercises, they will also gain a hands-on working knowledge of XML as supported by various XML parsers, XML tools and browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5/6 and Netscape/Mozilla.
• Become familiar with SOAP, UDDI & Service-Oriented Architectures
• Gain the essential knowledge to be able to use SOAP & UDDI
• Explore some of the practical issues of designing and deploying SOAP systems
• Understand the status of the SOAP/UDDI standardisation process
• Obtain some hands-on experience from small exercises and demo applications using SOAP/UDDI (optional).

Audience

This workshop is suitable for programmers working on Internet or Intranet applications, other developers who need to know how XML will affect their work and people interested in the exchange of data between disparate systems. All modules have a strong practical component, which enables each participant to learn from hands-on experience and from others while working alone or in small teams. Participants will also receive a full copy of supporting notes, designed to complement the instruction and workshops.

Pre-requisites

Participants should have some prior knowledge of programming and the older, but more widespread, HTML technology.

Course Topics (Days 1-2)

• Introducing XML: The need for portable data
• XML Structure and Syntax: Elements, Attributes, Namespaces, Entities
• XML in Context: Data Representation, Searching, Integration, Messaging
• Description Techniques for XML: DTDs, Schemas
• XML and Data: InfoSets, Data Types, XQuery, Database Integration
• Rendering and Formatting XML: CSS2, XSLT, XSLFO
• XML Browser Support: IE, Netscape/Mozilla, Opera
• XML Linking Technologies: XLink, XPath, XPointer, XInclude, XBase
• Parsing and Transforming XML: DOM, SAX, XSLT
• XML Gallery: SMIL, SVG/VML, MathML, WML, XHTML, XForms, CML, VoiceXML
• XML and Language Integration: JavaScript, Java, J2EE, .NET
• XML and Web Services: SOAP, UDDI, WSDL
• XML and B2B Integration: BPEL4WS, RosettaNet, BizTalk, ebXML, OAGI
• XML and Content Management: RDF, PRISM, Dublic Core, XMP, ICE, RSS, WebDAV
• XML Futures: Standards Activities, Trends

Course Topics (Day 3)

• Web system models
• Open Source offerings: Apache
• Competitive landscape: Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, IBM offerings
• SOAP envelope
• SOAP envelope rules
• SOAP RPC representation
• UDDI
• WSDL
• Microsoft .Net technologies: Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) including WS-Inspection, WS-Routing, WS-Referral, WS-Security, BizTalk
• Java technologies: JAXP, JAX-RPC, JAXR, JAXM, SAAJ, JAXB, J2EE & Web Services
• Futures