Building Oracle XML Applications

Structure of This Book

This book is not divided strictly by individual tool and function. Instead, it begins in Part I with an overview of fundamental XML standards and concepts. Part II covers all core Oracle XML technologies, presenting increasingly detailed discussions of various Oracle XML capabilities. Part III describes combining the technologies we’ve learned to build applications and portals. Finally, Part IV includes four useful appendixes with installation and reference information.

The book uses extensive examples—in both PL/SQL and Java—to present material of increasing sophistication.

The following list summarizes the contents in detail.

Part I, introduces the basics of XML and provides a high-level overview of Oracle’s XML technology. It consists of the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, provides a gentle introduction to XML by describing what it is, what you can do with it, why you should use it, and what software Oracle supplies to work with it.

• Chapter 2, describes how to build your own “vocabularies” of tags to represent the information you need to work with, as well as how to use XML namespaces and entities to modularize your documents and XPath expressions to search them.

Part II, describes the core development activities that Oracle XML developers need to understand when using XML with an Oracle database. It consists of the following chapters:

• Chapter 3, provides a typical “day-in-the-life” scenario illustrating the power of combining XML with an Oracle database.

• Chapter 4, describes how you can use Oracle’s JDeveloper product to help with XML development.

• Chapter 5, explains how you can use PL/SQL to load XML files, parse XML, search XML documents, post XML messages, and both enqueue and dequeue XML messages from queues.

• Chapter 6, explains how you can combine Java and XML both inside and outside Oracle8i to load XML files, parse XML, search XML documents, and post XML messages, as well as enqueue and dequeue XML messages from queues.

• Chapter 7, explains the fundamentals of creating XSLT stylesheets to carry out transformations of a source XML document into a resulting XML, HTML or plain text output.

• Chapter 8, explains how to build dynamic XML datagrams from SQL using declarative templates to perform many common tasks.

• Chapter 9, builds on the fundamentals from Chapter 7 and explores additional XSLT functionality like variables, sorting and grouping techniques, and the many kinds of useful transformations that can be done using a variation on the identity transformation.

• Chapter 10, gives Java developers a whirlwind introduction to PL/SQL and describes how to use PL/SQL to dynamically produce custom XML datagrams containing database information.

• Chapter 11, describes numerous techniques for programmatically producing XML datagrams using Java by using JDBC™, SQLJ, JavaServer Pages™, and the Oracle XML SQL Utility.

• Chapter 12, explains how to store XML datagrams in the database using the XML SQL Utility and other techniques, as well as how to retrieve them using XSQL pages and XSLT transformations.

• Chapter 13, describes how you can use Oracle8i ’s integrated interMedia Text functionality to search XML documents, leveraging their inherent structure to improve text searching accuracy.

• Chapter 14, describes the techniques required to insert arbitrarily large and complicated XML into multiple tables. It also covers using stylesheets to generate stylesheets to help automate the task.

Part III, describes how to build applications using Oracle and XML technologies. It consists of the following chapters:

• Chapter 15, builds on Chapter 8, explaining the additional features that make XSQL Pages an extensible framework for assembling, transforming, and delivering XML information of any kind.

• Chapter 16, describes how to extend the functionality of the XSQL Pages framework using custom action handlers, and how to extend the functionality of XSLT stylesheets by calling Java extension functions.

• Chapter 17, builds further on Chapter 11 and on earlier chapters, describing best-practice techniques to combine XSQL pages and XSLT stylesheets to build personalized information portal and sophisticated online discussion forum applications.

Part IV, contains the following summaries:

• Appendix A, provides the source code for the PL/SQL helper packages we built in Chapter 3: xml, xmldoc, xpath, xslt, and http.

• Appendix B, describes how to install the XSQL Servlet that you can use with any servlet engine (Apache JServ, JRun, etc.).

• Appendix C, graphically summarizes the relationships between key XML concepts and the family of XML-related standards that supports them.

• Appendix D, provides “cheat sheets” on XML, XSLT, and XPath syntax.