This course is organized into a series of lectures for the majority of the course. During the last few weeks of class, those who do projects will be presenting their projects during class time. Typically there will be a few presentations followed by a short lecture.

The lectures are designed to detail exactly how different XML technologies work and show examples. Questions are welcome at any time during the lecture and the slides and examples will be provided online. The intent is to give a sufficiently complete coverage of the core XML technologies: XML 1.1, XPath, XSLT, and XML Schema as well as detail their use via examples.

• To develop a solid knowledge of:

  • XML, Unicode, Namespaces, and Infosets.

  • XPath and XSLT

  • XML Schema and Schema Development Practices

  • Formatting XML using CSS or XSL Formating Objects

• Apply these technologies in a web-applications context:

  • Utilizing XSLT to format websites.

  • Simple web services.

  • XML in application architecture

  • XML Pipelines

  • JAXP & J2EE integration.

• See/utilize specialized vocabularies:

  • RSS 1.0 & 2.0

  • XHTML

  • WSDL & SOAP

  • RDF & OWL

Typically there will be one assignment per week and will consist of using the technologies detailed in a previous lectures to accomplish some task. Every so often there will be question & answer types of assignments.

The readings will be assigned each week as well. They are intended either to supplement the lecture or to provide additional reference material. Some readings are assigned specifically so that you are aware of the document and are not intended to be read in detail (e.g. The XML 1.1 recommendation). Such readings will be outlined on the course website as to which are "required" and which are there for your awareness.

For this course, you are required to use a tool/environment that supports:

• XML 1.0 compliant parsing and namespace handling.

• OASIS XML Catalogs for schema validation.

• XSLT Transformation, version 1.0

• XML Schema validation

• Tomcat (or some other J2EE compliant servlet container).

• Ant for builds.

• XHTML compliant browser: Mozilla, Netscape 7.x, Firefox, Thuderbird, Opera (i.e. not Internet Explorer).

The only tool that satisfies all of these at once (except the browser) is Netbeans--which is an IDE tool. It supports development of web applications as well as Java applications. It has many features supporting editing, authoring, and testing XML-based applications. In addition, it embeds Tomcat and so you can readily test web applications. It is highly recommended that you use Netbeans over any other tool--including Eclipse.

All the assignments will be made available as Netbeans projects so they can easily be run within the IDE. This does not preclude the ability to work on the assignments in some other tool.

The following assignments are required to get a grade in this course:

• 3 Unit Version:

  1. Complete all assignments.

  2. Develop a web application that uses at least two XML technologies.

  3. Present your application and architecture to the class.

  4. Document your project and write a short paper describing it.

  5. Turn in a working application (preferably a .war file)

• 1 Unit Version:

  1. Complete 75% all assignments.

  2. Write a one (or more) page XML-related project proposal that you think is feasible given what you've learned.

Project usually consist of development of small prototype application that demonstrates some aspect of XML-based development. They must use two different XML technologies and XSLT/XPath count as one. Some examples from previous years are:

• Developed a cocoon-based forms infrastructure that utilizes XML descriptions of the forms and processing.

• Developed a simple web service and front end for grades.

• Developed a schema for syllabi and XSLT for aggregating and presenting syllabi.

The recommended project structure is described online: text/html text/xhtml

Also, grading will follow these simple rules:

• Grade assignments will be based on performance relative to your peers.

• Points will be awarded and percentages will be calculated.

• 3 Unit Version:

  1. 50% Assignments

  2. 15% Presentation

  3. 35% Project

• 1 Unit Version:

  1. 90% Assignments

  2. 10% Project Proposal Paper

While working on your assignments or the project, you may find many resources that will help you accomplish your task. If you take advantage of such resources, including code samples, java class libraries, etc., please reference them in what you turn in. It is completely fine to have taken advantage of a known solution as that is what you all might do in a commercial setting. Do not pass off other peoples code, XSLT, schemata, etc. as you own. It will probably be easy to tell (especially with our friend Google available).

In addition, all students should be familiar with the Code of Student Conduct and know that the general rules stated in that document apply to this class. These rules and guidelines are available from Office of Student Life.