IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Version 7.0
feature packs are optionally installable product extensions that offer
targeted, incremental new features. The IBM WebSphere Application Server
Version 7.0 Feature Pack for XML delivers critical technology that
enables adoption of key XML standards and principles.
XML-structured data has become the predominant format for data
interchange. XML data is navigated, queried, or transformed in almost
every existing WebSphere application.
Since first being standardized, XML usage in application-development
environments has grown significantly to include many scenarios. WebSphere Application Server
is a leading platform for the latest application development standards,
including XML.
The Feature Pack for XML provides application developers with support
for the following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML standards:
- Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) 2.0
- Programming language used to transform XML into a new XML format
or into another presentation-oriented format such as HTML, XHTML,
or SVG
For more information about this standard, go to XSL
Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0.
- XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0
- Programming language designed to allow developers to select nodes
from an XML document
For more information about this standard, go
to XML
Path Language (XPath) 2.0.
- XML Query Language (XQuery) 1.0
- Query language built with the intent of enabling access to collections
of XML documents in a way that bridges retrieval of both structured
and unstructured data
For more information about this standard,
go to XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language.
These new and updated W3C XML standards offer application
developers numerous advanced capabilities for building
XML applications. Specific benefits delivered in the XPath 2.0, XSLT
2.0, and XQuery 1.0 standards include the following:
- Simpler XML application development and improved developer productivity
- Improved ability to query large amounts of data stored in XML
outside of a database with XQuery 1.0
- Improved XML-application performance through new features introduced
in the W3C specifications to address previous shortcomings
- Improved XML-application reliability with new support for XML
schema-aware processing and validation
Note: If you want to use XPath 1.0 or XSLT 1.0 (not in backwards-compatibility
mode), continue to use Java™ API
for XML Processing (JAXP) in Java 2
Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.6.
For more information about these W3C XML standards, go to W3C
XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 Become Standards: Tools to Query, Transform,
and Access XML and Relational Data.
The Feature Pack for XML also provides the IBM XML Application Programming Interface in
support of these standards. This application programming interface
invokes a runtime engine that is capable of executing XPath 2.0, XSLT
2.0, and XQuery 1.0 as well as manipulating the returned XML data.
The Feature Pack for XML includes the IBM Thin
Client for XML with WebSphere Application
Server. The thin client allows access to the same feature-pack API
and runtime functionality (XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0) available
in the Feature Pack for XML. The thin client can be copied to multiple
clients running Java SE in support
of a WebSphere Application
Server Version 7.0 installation.