Introduction to Server-Side XML

Summary

In this chapter, I showed you how to use server-side processing to work with XML documents. I examined the advantages of working on the server compared with client-side processing. You saw that you can apply transformations on the server and send only the transformed content to the client. This approach reduces the amount of content sent to the client and avoids the need to code for different browser types and versions.

The chapter gave a brief overview of using .NET 2.0 and PHP 5 to work with XML content. I worked through some simple examples showing how to perform common XML-related tasks. I looked briefly at

• Applying an XSLT transformation to an XML document to create XHTML

• Creating new elements and updating an external XML document

• Modifying existing XML content

• Deleting content from within an XML document

Even though I only covered .NET and PHP, many of the DOM manipulation methods are similar to those used client-side. The techniques demonstrated within this chapter could apply equally to other server-side languages. In the next two chapters, I’ll look at each of the two approaches in more detail.