Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Additional C++ Considerations

A few words are in order regarding my approach to using C++. In particular, I want to point out handling of strings, exceptions, and constants.

The final ISO and ANSI C++ standard has extremely useful string classes (at last!). These are much easier to use and less prone to runtime exceptions than old C-style char arrays, char pointers, and the C string library. However, these string classes are still not universally supported “out of the box” by many major C++ compilers. They weren't supported natively by Visual C++ 6.0, which I'm using for this book. Even though some add-on open source and proprietary class libraries do support these classes, many developers use only what is standard from the compiler vendor. In ...