Thursday, May 26, 2005

XPath

When I've heard people talking about XPath in the past, I see eyes light up, I hear voices raising in pitch with excitement, but I never understood why until today.

Quite simply, XPath allows you to search an XML file like a mini database.

Did that hit you? Read it again if you didn't, because it's extremely cool. An XML file becomes a searchable database. You get results and can use the values for your pleasure. And that my friends, is power. It's pretty much an essential tool if you're doing anything with XSLT. But I'm excited about it because I'm a Flash developer.

XML and Flash are like best friends, and with this handy dandy XPath package written in actionscript, I think they might be getting married. With it I can search an XML data source, and navigate around from that point. Using it, I can more easily create custom Objects and such. My head is bursting because it's so cool.