For practising with XML examples, which parser do u all recommend ? I have worked with Xerces and used DOM APIs in Servlets.
Xerces is good enough. The
test does not focus on specific parser implementations, but on the general parsing related issues only. Unless you are interested in understanding the subtleties of different parsers, you only need one. Any one will do the job.
Having said that, it is good to checkout the example programs that come with different parsers. They should all work with any parser you choose, with very little tweaking.
So if I use Xerces, which all examples do I need to work out ?
General parsing
- with and without DTD(with and without external entities )
- with and without Schema
- with and without validation turned off
- one schema against many instances ( to understand how validation works ).
- SAX and DOM parsing to understand different Handler interfaces.
- DOM implementation and tree navigation
- XSL Transformation - you can do this by just using the standard web browser. No programming experience required for this.
- Everything else that the exam covers and not in this list
How much programming exposure is recommended ?
Not much, because you will be peppered with questions related to Specs, not implementation. Even non-Java programmers such as VB or C++ write this test. That's the whole idea. You only need programming experience to understand and play with implementations. If you can assimilate the specs without hands-on, you don't need any programming exposure!
If you prefer to use Java as your language as choice( which I hope you do, ) you will need to know very basic language fundamentals such as defining and implementing interfaces, writing, testing and debugging stand-alone Java programs and browsing JavaDoc API references. As you can see, anyone who has worked for a couple of months in Java will have the required level of skill to do these things.
Hope that helps!
