Data does not need to be marked up in order to exchange it however, but in most all cases it does need to
have some kind of structure. Whether that be comma/tab separated values (csv or tsv) structured text which
Licensed to Menshu You
Zend Framework in Action (Ch01) Manning Publications Co. 16
bases its structure on a regular sequence of data separated by consistent delimiters, or serialized data such as
created by PHP??™s own serialize() function, or other formats like Javascript Object Notation (JSON) which can
be used as an alternative to XML in AJAX (and incidentally is accommodated for in the Zend Framework by
Zend_Json).
Little of this information should be new to readers of this book but the fact to take away is that what we
are trying to achieve is the passing of information from one system to another such that the recipient system
knows how to handle that data.
Figure 11.1 Mac OS X desktop application GarageSale which converses with eBay??™s XML based API.
If we take a look in Figure 11.1 at the application GarageSale that was mentioned earlier, it is clearly a
fairly complex application whose data could not be exchanged unless it was suitably structured in order for
eBay to process it and carry out whatever request it makes, such as creating a new item for auction.
Pages:
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306