Java and XML

Chapter 6. Transforming XML

If you are a backend systems developer or a systems architect, you should be seeing the value of XML by now. A language that represents data in a vendor-neutral way, that is easy to parse, that is portable, and that you can use from Java? Could this be the data format that solves so many of your interoperability issues? It just might be. However, if you are a content developer, an application assembler, or are involved with application presentation, you may be a little confused. Certainly you have heard a lot about the promise of XML for generating content for various types of clients, and how it provides a separation of presentation and data. Yet we have been through five chapters without a word about how this is accomplished. You might be wondering if this technology is really right for you. In either case, read on, because XML’s capabilities are just beginning to be showcased.

In this chapter, we begin the process of tackling XML transformations. This is a rather lengthy topic, and we begin in this chapter by discussing why XML transformations are important, the components involved, and the syntax used to accomplish transformations. The next chapter continues our discussion by looking at how Java XSLT processors can take an XML document and generate various types of content, often wildly different, from the same initial XML data, and how the Document Object Model (DOM) is used in this process. Throughout, we will continue to focus on the value of XML ...