A few months ago I came across a relatively new book: Processing XML Documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g by Deepak Vohra (370 pages, Packt Publishing, ISBN 978-1-847196-66-8, February 2009).

It is an interesting mix of topics, all having to do with XML and most directly related to JDeveloper. The topcis and chapters do not at all times seem logically bundled together (for example design time and run time seem to be somewhat strangely intermingled in the book) but they provide a lot of useful information to any developer working on applications that involve XML in some way (and which one does not today) using JDeveloper as an IDE or Oracle XDK 11g..

And JDeveloper 11g’s XML capabilities may not be entirely on par with single issue IDEs such as XMLSpy, it certainly does a very good job at many frequent and less frequent XML tasks. This book does a good job at showing the various XML specific features of JDeveloper – although it also fails to mention one or two. It contains many examples of writing Java code to process XML in some way, primarily using XDK 11g; those examples are not always really specifically related to JDeveloper 11g, as the code uses standard libraries that can be used from any IDE. However, as examples of using XDK 11g for tasks like parsing, validating, transforming and querying (XPath) it is very valuable and will save developers a lot of googling.

The book’s cover states "Inspired by the author’s previous XML articles for the Oracle community, this expanded hands-on tutorial guides newcomers and intermediate users through JDeveloper 11g and XML document development. "  Inspired seems putting it mildly: much of the book’s contents seems to consist of slightly refined versions of technical articles previously published on the Oracle Technology Network and other websites or books. Which is not certainly not necessarily a bad thing by the way. On the one hand it means that the chapters can be read in pretty much any order you like as they are fairly stand-alone. At the same time, the book does not have a clear overall thread or storyline except for a simple example – a simple and not very exciting Oracle Magazine article catalog document that makes appearances in most chapters.

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