Hour 22. XML

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• Some basics about XML

• How to parse XML documents with the XML Parser functions

• How to create XML documents with the DOM functions

• How to traverse an XML data structure

• How to use an XSL document to transform XML

• How to parse XML documents with the SimpleXML extension

It would have been hard to miss the buzz created by XML in recent years. XML is fast becoming a tremendously important tool for sharing data between applications and separating logic from presentation in larger projects. Since the first release of this book, PHP has continued to improve its support for XML. With PHP and Zend increasingly at the heart of larger e-business applications, reliable support for XML is essential. For the Web programmer, too, an understanding of XML is no longer an optional extra.

As of version 5, PHP's XML support has been enhanced in two ways. First, PHP has bundled a very reliable and efficient XML library (Gnome's libxml2) upon which all its XML functions are now based. Second, PHP 5 now provides an extremely easy tool for working with XML, called SimpleXML.