Complete novice - what do I need?

[Buttercup]

I have never used xml before and while I have found lots of tutorials
and help on the structure of xml and the theory behind it, I can find
nothing on how to actually implement it. I want to accept an xml feed
from a major tour operator, this will mean ALOT of data. Do I need to
parse the xml and then put it into a database? What database should I
use? What parser should I use? Where do I begin????????


Thanks to all replies

 

[strajan]

First you have to decide what you want to do with the data and then ask how
to do that in this forum.

XSL is a simple way to extract data from xml.

Here is a link to oracle and xml:
http://technet.oracle.com/tech/xml/learner.html

All the Best.

 

[Will Stuyvesant]

[[email protected] (Buttercup)]

I have never used xml before and while I have found lots of tutorials
and help on the structure of xml and the theory behind it, I can find
nothing on how to actually implement it. I want to accept an xml feed
from a major tour operator, this will mean ALOT of data. Do I need to
parse the xml and then put it into a database? What database should I
use? What parser should I use? Where do I begin????????

If you want to do anything with xml except reading or printing it in
its raw form, you have to parse it.

To do the parsing W3C (www.w3c.org) recommends DOM or SAX, and they
are both methodologies and a contrived way of doing it. But every
decent programming langauge supports both. DOM puts everything in a
datastructure (or object structure) in the programming language of
your choice. This means you will run out of memory if that takes up
over 512MB (your computer memory). The SAX approach is based on
"events". First you have to tell the SAX parser what you are
interested in. A SAX parser then reads the XML and if it sees a
pattern you are interested in it calls the accompanying function (or
class method) you specified.

About databases: why don't you just use the XML as a database?
Storage space is really cheap these days. Databases are good for
solving multiple access and concurrency issues, do you have those
issues?

If your boss is not telling you you *have* to use an oldfashioned
statically typed language like Java or C# or C++ or Basic etc. then
you can do what I do: use Python, use the pyRXP parser, enjoy the
speed and the freedom.