Welcome to Serene Breezes Plant Nursery. Take time to browse through the plant catalogs in our online nursery. Choose from a unique selection of common and reliable landscape plants as well as new and exotic varieties.
Project Purpose:
The purpose of developing this online nursery project was to exercise the fundamental concepts of XML including document and language creation and implementation that we had learned during the “Introduction to XML” class conducted by Ms. Marie Taylor Harper at DeAnza College
XML is a cross-platform, software and hardware independent tool for transmitting information and XML offers many advantages including Simplicity, Extensibility, Interoperability, and Openness. Going into detail, with XML, data can be stored outside of HTML; with XML data having the capability to be exchanged between incompatible systems; with XML financial information can be exchanged over the Internet; with XML plain text files can be used to share & store data; with XML data is available to many users. Basically XML was created to store, carry and exchange data and XML was not designed to display data.
We, Anu, Jyothi, Rick and Shaifali already have some programming experience and we wanted to gain an understanding of the XML language and begin incorporating the XML concepts into our day-to-day technical requirements. We anticipated that working on a Project like this would provide us a better learning opportunity and we gladly accepted the challenge when our teacher Ms.Marie suggested us to pick a project topic.
Why an “Online Plant Nursery” Topic?
Well, selecting a project topic was a bit confusing for us to start with. Since we would be spending a lot of time on this project, we wanted the subject to be something we would consider interesting. Having played with CSS in this course tenure, we developed a taste for presenting eye appealing data presentation. This in turn made us to select those projects, where we could play with a beautiful image gallery. So we started Project Subject with Restaurant Menu, Tourist Information, Golf Course, Baseball Scores and Online Plant Nursery etc. And “Online Plant Nursery” met each of our interests.
XML Tags Implemented in This Project
- PlantCategory
- Plant
- name
- image
- price
- details
- description
- mature_height
- mature_spread
- mature_form
- growth rate
- sun_exposure
- moisture_requirements
- optional soil_type
- flower_color
- foilage_color
- fall_color
- zones
- para
- ref
The Problems that can be solved in a real time Online Nursery Web Applications using XML that we have developed for this project.
Assumptions: we have a real time relational Nursery database consisting of structured tables.
ex1: Importing records
If we have a large number of specimen records that we want to add to our database, we can use the import functionality, which reads XML files that have tagged values and follow a rigorous yet flexible and easily understood format. In a sense, XML files are “self-descriptive”, but formally they follow a standard adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium. For example, the data type definition used by The Compleat Botanica is specified in the file CompleatBotanicaSchema.xml.
In addition to XML files, most applications can read delimited files such as comma separated values (CSV) and tab-delimited values (TXT). Delimited files are exported from most common spreadsheet and database applications.
In our project, we provided self descriptive XML files that can be used for data import and export mechanisms. We also developed a comma separated values files that most applications can read and understand.
What we learned from this Project?
- Practiced writing well-formed and valid XML
- Understood the uses of CSS
- Practiced Reading & Creating DTDs
- Practiced Reading & Creating “Relax NG” validation schemas