Anyone using XML for REAL?

OK, I've read all the hoopla, worked through a bunch of XML tutorials, and come to terms with DOMDocument in VB. I can code to navigate through an XML document, and add nodes in the right place. I could conceivably write say a DB system where the SQL tables are actually XML documents and we could then have a live system for transactions for instance. (Eg Customers, Products, Sales etc)

But this is all well and good.... can anyone tell me what they're using XML for? Do you use it as the database, or still use an SQL database for the processing, extracting into XML documents when portability is required?


Or what?

It's a markup language that's far superior to HTML...doesn't have a database.

Have used it to push documents through from Unix to NT....

But Jethro what I mean is, is your document on the Unix system XML in its 'native mode' for want of a better term, or do you have data in a different format (perhaps even proprietary to whatever's running on the Unix box) which you export or extract or whatever to XML for transportability?

If the data in the Unix box is naturally XML- as opposed to specially extracted as XML- why did you make that choice, and what system on the Unix side is the XML user / generator.

Then on the NT side, once the document arrives as XML, what happens to it then? Do you take it into some other system for re-use, or is it displayed... or what.

I'm really trying to get my mind round where XML fits into the grand scheme of things.

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Originally posted by Jim Brown
OK, I've read all the hoopla, worked through a bunch of XML tutorials, and come to terms with DOMDocument in VB. I can code to ?.........Or what?

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XML can be used for retrieving information from an information provider or You can send your data to another machine and an Application server process your data and returns the output to you. XML is the backbone for web services(Though not limited to the web, you can use it in any medium -- even if you exchange information through pigeons :p ).

I suggest you go through this.

A Travel-Related Case Study Using XML

I've used XML successfully for data exchange and for non-relational databases. For my intranet, I have a document manager I wrote in Perl with XML DOM that lets department managers upload/maintain Word, Excel, etc documents for there departmental page that use XML to store metadata and the file list. I also have a VB app that generates Excel reports for one of our departments, and I didn't want to recode and recompile the app for every new report, so it gets a list of XML files from the web server, and the XML files contain how to present and call stored procedures to get data to generate the reports from the MS-SQL Database.

I'm also planning to rewrite my personal page in XML and Perl (as opposed to ASP and Access) if I can ever find the spare time...