[sclug] PHP Question

[Neil Haughton]

PMFBI,  but  this looks like the sort of thing my colleagues do every 
day, and they wouldn't dream us employing XML unless they had to 
transport the data from A to B though a firewall, and certainly not in 
between a database and a web application (again, unless a firewall came 
between the two which isn't likely).

I agree with Will - serverside PHP accessing the database directly 
producing HTML output would be best, but if you have to use XML between 
the database and web-server, use XSLT on the server side, not client 
side. That way you can make your web app browser neutral with least effort.

regards,

Neil Haughton

>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> Re: [sclug] PHP Question
> From:
> Will Dickson <wrd at glaurung.demon.co.uk>
> Date:
> Thu, 12 Aug 2004 11:56:39 +0100
> To:
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
>
> To:
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
>
>
> tim wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi all
>> I have a quick question about so architecture.
>> I am writing some software for a hotel. It will be in PHP because I 
>> want to learn it. What I would liketo do is have PHP access a MYsql 
>> db and create XML that will be sent via HTTP to the browser where I 
>> will use XSLT to format it. I have done something similar previously 
>> using Perlscript and M$ XMLHTTP and Microsoft.XMLDOM. Obviously I 
>> want to be as browser independant as possible and the XMLHTTP 
>> solution has a prerequisite of IE6.
>
>
> Assuming that you don't want to contribute to M$'s attempts to 
> monopolise the web, you would be much better off doing the transform 
> server-side and sending ordinary (X)HTML to the browser. (FWIW this is 
> exactly what our software does.) Trying to do anything clever will 
> give you so many compatibility problems it really won't be worth it.
>
> You should also be aware that MS's implementations of XSLT are 
> variants which are incompatible with the W3C standard, and vary with 
> IE version. That which works in IE6 may not work in IE5 and 
> vice-versa, and probably won't work with a standards-compliant 
> implementation either.
>
> Alternatively, IIRC PHP is more-or-less designed to allow you to 
> populate HTML directly from the DB. Apart from the amusement value, 
> what do you gain from going via XML?
>
>
> Regards
>
>
> Will.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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