FOP has resurfaced with a different meaning—as an acronym for the Formatting-Object Processor, part of the Open Source Apache Project. The FOP processor performs an interesting stunt: it converts an XSL-FO file into an Adobe Postscript Description Format (PDF) file.

By passing parameters to your XSLT documents, you can supply the extra information and simultaneously create transformations usable with many different XML documents.

Fortunately, converting fixed-field length text files into XML is not a terribly difficult undertaking, though you need to be careful about a few 'gotchas'.

How to use XSLT and a schema to generate stored procedures that both create a relational database and store the data in the generated tables.

Solution Summary: In XSLT, you can take advantage of extensibility, a known document structure, and transforms to produce self-documenting XSLT templates.

To properly use XSLT you first have to understand the difference between recursive and nonrecursive programming.

You can build a new XML object based upon its schema and go the other way, taking an object and building a schema from it.

An XML server can be very useful in managing a very large XML database. These servers produce XML based upon an initial query of some sort, borrowing on the RDBMS concept of normalization.

The process of communicating between XML and databases is not ideal but there has been progress on that front with both Oracle and Microsoft providing updates that address key XML functionality needs.

XSL query language can only perform queries based upon the complete text of a text node. Learn how to use regular expessions to let you you search at a lower level of granularity than the XML text element.

The fundamental problem with any text-to-XML conversion is that without tags, an XSL filter or schema sees such files as undifferentiated blobs. However, here's one case where you can harness the XML Document Object Model itself.

With an understanding of XMLHTTP and ASP, you can learn how to send XML back and forth from the server.