Responding to Paul Michali (07:09 AM 3/19/2001 -0500):
>I haven't read much about XML. Can someone point me to a few references
>to it so that I can learn more about how this could be used? I'm looking more
>for thebig picture; how say one application on a machine can access a database
>(e.g. several flat files) on the same machine. This machine *may* have a
>network interface or it may not. It will have a hard disk drive. It
>doesn't have
>a web server.

In essence, XML is just a textual formatting standard for data. Each
"record" consists of textual tags surrounding data. You can read it by
parsing out or regexping the tags. There are available libraries for
reading and writing XML in almost every language.

An example may suffice to give the flavor. Here's a few records from a
simple database, in XML:

<RECORD>
<NAME><FIRST>Ron</FIRST><LAST>Jeffries</LAST></NAME>
<CITY>Pinckney</CITY>
<STATE>Michigan</STATE>
</RECORD>
<RECORD>
<STATE>
California
</STATE>
<NAME>
<LAST>Jones</LAST>
<FIRST>James</FIRST>
<MIDDLE>Earl</MIDDLE>
</NAME>
</RECORD>

There are frills and details, data definitions also expressed in XML,
attributes and such, but mostly what one needs to know is (in my opinion)
expressed in that example.

At this level, XML is an interesting way to represent any kind of
structured data. There are many many tools; there's a translation language
to transform XML files to other formats; all kinds of things. Right now, of
all the XML books I have, I would recommend none.

Regards,

Ronald E Jeffries
http://www.XProgramming.com
http://www.objectmentor.com