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Orc · 02-29-2008, 09:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DeMo

There are more uses to XML other than RSS.

You can use it to organize and store simple data like configuration files for your application.

Code:

<screen>
  <width>1024</width>
  <height>768</heigth>
</screen>

Let's say you're creating a CMS or a Blog system and you have a plugin architecture that users can use to enhance the functionality of the product. You can define that plugins for your system must come with a info.xml file following this structure:

Code:

<plugin>
  <name>My Plugin</name>
  <author>John Doe</author>
  <description>This plugin is useless</description>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <releasedate>01/01/2008</releasedate>
</plugin>

This would make it a lot easier for you to extract info from each installed plugin.

XML is also used as a data interchange format. Take AJAX as an example, the X in AJAX stands for "XML" because the data is commonly returned in XML format. Sometimes you need to export data from some place to import it in another, in this case you can create an exporter that writes the data in XML format and then the importer that reads data from XML files.

Another use is for Web-RPC (Remote Procedure Calls), take a look here for an example, it shows how you can query a BOINC project for user information, the data is returned as XML.

I've listed some of the common uses of XML but there's really a lot more to it than it seems.

Isn't this method used by Facebook for Developers? :D XML is awesome!