It has been more than a year since Microsoft Visual FoxPro 7.0 has been released. With this version, VFP developers worldwide were officially presented with XML capabilities. Despite this fact, today it's still difficult to find developers who have already used the XML features, mainly because they haven't been able to find books and articles about using XML in conjunction with Visual FoxPro. Now the search is over!
The book was written by Fábio Vazquez, who has in-depth knowledge about both XML and VFP. He is a frequent presenter of the 4-hour long XML sessions at RapoZine's conferences, providing the attendees with comprehensive details of working with XML in VFP.
In this book you will find everything you need to know to start playing with XML, leveraging your existent knowledge of VFP and guiding you through this amazing new world. There is no other book on the market which explains XML from a VFP developer perspective. Having witnessed Fabio's presentations and now reading his book, I'm obliged to say that this is a mandatory book for all VFP developers who have yet to jump into the XML swimming pool.
Fábio starts by briefly explaining the history of XML and why it's important and then goes into the basics, explaining the parts of an XML document, some encoding issues, Parsers and so on.
In the second chapter, he goes deep into the MSXML Parser, digging into its different versions, talking about XML Data Bindings, binding XML to data through Internet Explorer, and demonstrating how to use it within Visual FoxPro.
After that, it's time to get to know the DOM (Document Object Model). Since now we are familiar with the MSXML Parser, we are now able to explore the DOM in more detail, understanding what's behind documents, nodes, etc.
In the next chapter, we are introduced to the XML Namespaces. When we're working with XML, the namespaces are present almost everywhere and here we aquire the knowledge to become familiar with them.
XML documents are no more than text files, and because of that we need to make sure that a given XML document is valid. Here is where the XML Schema enters the picture. In this book you will be introduced to Schemas and learn the details of working with them.
When we're working with data in VFP, we're used to utilizing Select-SQL statements to extract the pieces of data that we need. When we're using XML documents, we also want to query data from it in a similar fashion, and we can do this with something called XPath.
Many times we will want to "transform" our XML documents into HTML documents, or even to other text formats like another XML file that conforms to the needs of your partners, customers or yourself. This is addressed by the use of something called XSLT. In his book Fábio shows how we can make use of XSLT from within our VFP applications, with extremely successful results.
VFP 7 came with three built-in functions for XML: CursorToXML(),XMLToCursor() and XMLUpdateGram(). Fábio will tell you everything about this functions.
Finally, at the end of the book, Fábio will walk you through several technologies that can be integrated by the use of XML and VFP, like wwXML, .NET, WAP, SQL Server 2000 XML support, binary data and so on.
I've told you this is a mandatory book! What are you waiting for? Go out and buy it now!
