XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Communications Protocols

Building flexible communications protocols that link disparate systems has always been a difficult area in computing. With the proliferation of computer networking and the Internet, building distributed systems has become even more important.

While XML itself is only a data format, not a protocol, XML’s flexibility and platform agnosticism has inspired some new developments on the protocol front. XML messaging started even before the XML specification was finished and has continued to evolve since then.

XML as a part of the Web: REST

One of the earliest approaches, and still one of the best, is transmitting XML over HTTP. The server assembles an XML document and sends it to a client just like it sends an HTML file or a GIF image. For example, suppose a developer is building a service that takes a U.S. Zip Code and returns current weather information such as temperature and barometric pressure. The browser or other client application can encode the Zip Code as a query, producing a URL like http://example.com/weatherNow.cgi?zip=95472.

It then sends a normal HTTP GET request to the server example.com requesting a representation of the resource /weatherNow.cgi?zip=95472. The server constructs an XML document representing the current weather for the Zip Code 95472, which might look something like Example 16-1.

Example 16-1. An XML document containing the weather in Sebastopol

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <weatherNow xmlns="http://example.com/weatherNow/" ...