Extensible Markup Language (XML) has attracted the software community with its open standards, set of tools permitting interaction between applications, and separation of content and presentation. The big software firms, Sun and Microsoft, have provided the community of developers with application programming interfaces (APIs) for dealing with XML technology.

This book is about XML development with the Java language, and the large number of examples makes it useful for developers of all levels. The authors present, through an XML example catalog, the different Java APIs for treating extensible languages with commented sources for use with the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).

The book is organized into six parts. The first part, “Parsing, Validating, and Addressing,” is composed of five chapters, each focusing on a particular aspect of how to develop XML, XML Schema, XPath, and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) documents with Java. The second part, “Object Bindings,” is composed of two chapters, and treats the binding between XML and Java objects. The third part, “XML and Databases,” explains how to treat XML documents either with a native XML database or with a relational database. The fourth part, “DOM Level 3.0,” is about the document object model (DOM) Level 3 API for loading and saving. The fifth part is about the conversion of XML to spreadsheets or PDF. Finally, the sixth part, “Web Applications and Services,” deals with Web applications with Ajax and how to build Web services.

In chapter 1, “Introducing XML and Java,” the authors give an outline of XML and Java through the Eclipse IDE. Chapter 2 is an introductory chapter to parsing XML documents. Chapter 3 is about validating XML documents with XML Schema. Chapter 4 shows how to address XPath with Java. Chapter 5 discusses XSLT, and shows how to transform XML documents with XSLT using a Java API. Chapters 6 and 7 cover object bindings and explain how to marshal and unmarshal XML documents. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with databases—native and relational—and how these treat XML documents. In chapter 10, “Loading and Saving with DOM Level 3 API,” the authors provide the aspect features of the DOM Level 3 API and discuss how to load and save within Java. In chapters 11 and 12, the authors discuss converting XML documents to either spreadsheets or PDF. Chapter 13, “Building Web Applications with Ajax,” discusses how to develop Ajax applications. Finally, in chapter 14, the authors present XML-based Web services and how to develop them within Java. All of the chapters have corresponding code and examples that are downloadable from the publisher’s Web site.

It is really difficult to find drawbacks with this book since it covers all Java API extensible languages through commented examples. This is the XML development with Java reference book. It will help anyone learn all XML development aspects step by step. I highly recommended it.