Professional PHP

Day 3 – XML & XSLT

Course Author: Paul Reinheimer

Course Author: D. Keith Casey, Jr.
[email protected]

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 Session Information
• This course has been designed to introduce
XML, XSLT, and related techniques available in
PHP 5
• Exercises will be presented to provide the
opportunity to try out new techniques and
experiment.

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 For exercises in this section:

 You'll need:
– A fully functional PHP5+ instance (5.2+ is preferred)
– Your favorite PHP editor
– A willingness to break things, make mistakes, and
ask questions

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 What is XML?

• A way to encode documents electronically – first

specs in 1996, became useful in 1999, became
common in 2000+
• The most common example is RSS
• PHP4 used a SAX-style (event driven) parser,
was painful to use, more painful to extend
• PHP5 implemented the DOM-based parser
known as SimpleXML

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 Key Aspects of XML

• Character Encoding & Escaping

• Well-formedness & Validation
– Numerous competing validation standards
– DTD, XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron,
etc
• Useful and compatible with just about every
language out there...

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 Benefits of XML

• Human readable (mostly)

• Flexible in implementation technology
• Vendor-independence
• Based on “open” standards
• Tends to increase collaboration

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 Drawbacks of XML

• Human readable (mostly)

• Vendor mis-implementations
• Different design paradigm
– Mostly relevant to Web Services in general

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 SimpleXML to the Rescue!

• It's like XML without the XML!

• Every XML Document is treated as an array
• Every Attribute is an “element” of the array
• Every Child Node is an item in that array
– Every Child Node is an item in that array
• Every Child Node is an item in that array
– Every Child Node is an item in that array
» Every Child Node is an item in that array
$xmldoc = simplexml_load_file('rss.xml');
print_r($xmldoc->children());
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 Exercise 1

• Get an RSS/Atom feed

– Suggested: http://feeds.feedburner.com/phpa
• Load it into memory using SimpleXML
• Dump the content to screen
– Use <pre> to make it legible
• Display a list of titles

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 What is XSLT?

• A templating language used for transforming

XML into something else... XHTML, XML, even
PDF (via XSL-FO)
• All the same rules as XML apply because XSL is
XML, just a more specific form
• It's sort of a functional programming language
with if/else, case, and other basic conditional
statements

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 Exercise 2

• Using the previous RSS/Atom feed:

– Suggested: http://feeds.feedburner.com/phpa
• Create an XSL file that displays the titles
– Resources:
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Transformation
s
– http://devzone.zend.com/article/688

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 Web Services

• Web Services allow disparate applications to

communicate with each other over the Internet.
– Broad Definition, includes Ajax and B2B
communications.
– Many different protocols and implementations exist.
– XML is a popular choice for communication: cross
platform, language independent.

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 So how does this relate to XML?

• Why does XML fit nicely for Web Services?

– XML
• Human readable (mostly)
• Flexible in implementation technology
– Vendor-independence
• Based on “open” standards
• Easier to add additional partners
– “Many parts, loosely joined”
• Promotes reuse/commoditization of components
• Increased collaboration
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 And the drawbacks?

• So XML solves all of our problems, right?

– XML
• Lots of data to push, pull, manipulate
• Vendor mis-implementations
– Different design paradigm
• Bypasses the “planned” user interfaces
• Different security model
• Dependency management
– SOAP / RPC
• Dedicated application servers
14 • Vendor/marketing-driven
 So who uses Web Services?

• Everyone:
– Amazon (AWS), Ebay, FedEx, USPS, Google,
PayPal, Delicious, Flickr, United States National
Weather Service, Library of Congress, Twitter,
Basecamp, SugarCRM, Blogger, Intellipedia,
Getty Images, and lots of others...

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 So what's the point?

• Sites offer web services to provide information

they believe other people want or need
– Providing information over a web service may be
cheaper computationally, or in labour than
alternatives
– Communicating with clients over a web service
increases the barrier of conversion to a competitor
– Automated communication allows higher levels of
customer service
– Offering something your competitors do not
provides a competitive advantage
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 How?

• The majority of sites implement either a REST

based web service, or one using SOAP
• Some sites choose to create their own protocol
from scratch, these are problematic
• Some large providers implement both, allowing
the programmer to choose the method that
meets their needs, or matches their skills

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 SOAP

• The word formally known as an acronym for

the Simple Object Access Protocol
• SOAP is the successor to XML-RPC
• Microsoft, IBM, and the W3C created SOAP
with cross platform interoperability in mind
• It’s a very thick protocol, there’s lots involved

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 REST

• REpresentational State Transfer

– The term was defined in Roy Fielding’s doctoral
dissertation in 2000
• The term is now used to describe virtually any
non-SOAP web service, including many that
violate some of the concepts presented in the
paper
• Under REST, the state of a resource can be
represented and transmitted
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 Exercise 3

• Using the previous RSS/Atom feed:

– Suggested: http://feeds.feedburner.com/phpa

• Validate the XML structure

– Note: This is not the same as well-formed

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 Homework

• Choose a Web Service and explore it

– Flickr is a good option
• Start with the read-based functions but try to
use one of the write/update-based functions
• Good resources:
– http://benramsey.com/tag/rest/
– RESTful Web Architectures

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