XML – Why and Its Uses

Suppose, communication is to be established between applications by sending messages. Application A wants to send first names and last name of students to application B and B on receiving the message should acknowledge it sending message “Accepted”. There are many different message formats in which application A can send message to application B. They won’t be able to properly communicate until a proper message structure is defined between application A and B.

Thus, XML defines a message structure for the data that needs to be communicated between different applications.

• XML can be used to store data.
• Better for rendering data in a structure format, i.e. records and lists and trees
• Its is used by many programming tools/software.
• Can be used to render HTML

• Validation – XML allows validation of its data and structure using XSD or Schema.
• Searchable – Content inside XML can be easily searched using XPATH or XQuery
• Transformation – XSLT can be used to transform data in XML into desired format.
• Parsing – XML has Parsing standards: DOM, SAX, StAX

<student>
  <firstname>Varun</firstname>
  <lastname>Goel</lastname>
</student>