Program by Day

XML is the foundation of any dynamic content delivery application. The basic principles of XML—structuring content to enable reliable automated processing, separating content from presentation, and imbuing content with semantics to convey additional levels of meaning—are all required to make true dynamic delivery a reality.

However, many sites that attempt to be “data-driven” to provide dynamic and personalized content run into a number of challenges, even when using XML as the data format. They run into scalability problems when the XML is stored in relational databases or file systems, which are inefficient at serving high volumes of XML content. In addition, developers often rely on proprietary or cumbersome programming models, with complex procedural logic that is hard to develop and maintain. Because of the development difficulty, many sites rely on static Web forms that users find difficult to interact with. Most sites also limit users to a few well-defined search choices, again because of the difficulty in building interactive Web applications and concerns about the performance of unconstrained queries. It can also be challenging to capture “user feedback”—things like comments, ratings, and votes. This user generated content can result in a very high volume of small content fragments that need to be efficiently captured and easily associated with their related objects, something that’s hard to do when Web pages are actually temporal, dynamic views.

To address these challenges, a number of XML processing standards are emerging as the preferred approaches for architecting a dynamic site to be both scalable and maintainable. These standards include: XQuery, the powerful language for querying collections of XML data; XProc, a pipeline language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents; XForms, for specifying forms-based interfaces and processing; and Process Data Module (PDM), a specification from the S1000D standard for defining interactive processing structures for non-linear tasks. The value of these standards is that they provide a declarative model for application development that adapts better to changing needs than programming in traditional procedural languages. And, because they are expressed in XML syntax, they open up additional opportunities for automating the development process; for example, using XQuery to compose XForms instances for highly personalized interaction with end users.

This session is targeted at Web development professionals who are looking for a better way to architect their sites, leveraging the latest standards to lower risk, reduce development and maintenance costs, and bring their sites to production faster. By attending this session, they will learn:

Which XML processing standards are important for architecting dynamic delivery sites
How these standards help to reduce development effort and improve site functionality
Best practices for creating and managing the XML content that drives dynamic sites, including user-generated content

The session will include examples of actual deployments that illustrate the use of these standards and practices.

Building a Scalable XML-based Dynamic Delivery Architecture: Standards and Best Practices

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