Articles by David Kershaw

Finding the Declarative Tipping Point; XQuery, XML, and the RDBMS

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:00:00 EDT

Moving information from a database into an application may be the most common challenge developers face. How many of us make it through life without meeting object/relational (O/R) mapping in some form? Certainly not too many. Lately it has become equally difficult to avoid XML/relational (X/R) mapping. Because XML, and especially XML Schema (XSD), are object-like paradigms, the mapping difficulty is approximately the same. However, under the ever-expanding influence of XML, the extract, transform, load process that gets data from a database into an application (and vice versa) may be about to get radically more simple and declarative.

Fighting Against Complacency

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

This morning I find myself pondering one of the more subtle coincidences of my daily life: this month my company, Altova, launched not only a formal standards-based XML certification exam, but also new training classes for our first systems integration-oriented tool, MAPFORCE. Beyond the blatant plug for my team's work, why is the proximity of these two very different educational efforts interesting?

Multipass Validation with XSD and Schematron Part 2

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 00:00:00 EDT

In Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Volume 4, issue 7) we outlined why a development group might consider alternative validation schemes. An example from our experience is applying work group rules to the process of XSD design. We said rules could take the form of a Schematron schema that would be applied when a developer validates an XSD against the schema for XSD.

Multipass Validation with XSD and Schematron Part 1

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 EDT

If it is important that your XML documents are correct, catching mistakes early is, of course, much less costly than catching them later. This should not be news to any XML developer.