how do i write a web-application based on xml?

[wu_trax]

is there any good example / tutorial for such things? i know what xml is, what a well formed document is and the like and im sure i could write *something*, but what is the most common way?

im searching for some example-code, can anyone help?

[pablissimo]

Do you mean by way of using something like PHP (the Expat library for instance) to do something with the data held within an XML document or just to apply formatting to a static xml page with XSLT?

[Structural Integrity]

At school we did an XML project last year. We had to make an online helpdesk based on XML.
I got the source we produced with the projectgroup on my website ( http://www.structweb.com/?show=project&project=10 ) but it's a big mess (codewise, documentation-wise, and project-wise)

We used Cocoon/Tomcat as server and Xindice as database ( All open source: http://xml.apache.org )
The project was a big fiasco. Source produced is below standards, documentation is not available (Because it's Dutch) and the final product doesn't work (only a few parts do).
I can't say I've become a big fan of XML webapps because of this project. Even more so, I'd tell anyone who wants to do this as a personal project NOT to do it. It's messy and poorly documented/supported compared to proven technologies like PHP.

[edit]
Note, if you want to do something simple with XML/XSL in your webbrowser, you can check out www.w3schools.com/xml and www.w3schools.com/xsl . That is relatively simple to get going.
But if you want serverside scripting like with PHP, you have to go the Cocoon way (Perhaps there are other servers out there, I dunno) which is quite hard to get going (from my experience).
[/edit]

[wu_trax]

maybe ill explain what im trying to do.
i want to build an online-shop-system based on xml. so first i need to get the data out of a database and put it into an xml-document (dynamically, ofc). and then im planning to use xslt to transform the whole thing into xhtml or whatever else. the idea is to completly seperate layout from the whole data-base-stuff, so that it becomes easier to reuse the shop for different customers (who all want a different layout).
i already wrote the shop-stuff in php and it became a little more complicated than just a shopping card and a few products. now im planing to do the whole thing again, with java, tomcat and cocoon. i already tryed a few things with cocoon, but that were only very simple examples

adn thanks for the link, ill have a look. im not exactly sure on how to start yet.

[Coffee]

Seems your adding another layer of complexity (with xslt) when you can just get php to form the html, since every design and layout option can be handled by the css part of xhtml.

visit www.csszengarden.com for a decent demo of what can be done with stylesheets.

[Structural Integrity]

What I've learnt from this school project was that the cocoon platform really showed its strength when you used several ways to serve the data to the viewer.
The XSLT was capable of making all kinds of filetypes, ranging from HTML, to WAP to PDF to DOC and much much more. As long as you can write a transformer for it, you can serve that kind of filetype. And this with great ease because your data and page logic was seperated from the XSL stylesheet. So you only had to rewrite the stylesheet, not the page logic. Try doing that with PHP.

For our project cocoon was an overkill, but perhaps it suits your project better.
I'd look at the alternatives of PHP/ASP and decide if the flexibility of cocoon outweighs the development ease of PHP. From what we've experienced it's not that easy developing for cocoon as there are only a few sites that have tutorials and sources about it.

Let us know what you're doing and what your findings are. I find it rather interresting because cocoon might well be the standard of future web development as the people who gave us the project claimed, though I personally have my doubts.

[wu_trax]

i think ill try cocoon, although the last time i tryed to get started with it i gave up frustrated. more or less ill do this just for fun anyway, but if i manage to get it running i might be able to sell it \o/


PS check your PM, at best in the next 24h because i get disconnected after that time by my damn isp