Considered one of the "next steps" in web development, PHP/XML/XSL and XPath can make creating complete websites and even web services a breeze - sometimes, even from the same data. Here to show you how to harness this powerful technology is this new article from PHPBuilder.

In PHP, XML, XSL, XPATH and Web Services: This could be the start of something beautiful, the author introduces (briefly) readers to the N-tier architecture to set the stage. Continuing on from there, he gives the example of a web service based on the SOAP structure. The XML structure underlying it all doesn't even have to resemble the SOAP data, but thanks to XSL and XPath, the results can be transformed into just about anything.

They continue on giving other examples such as "using XPATH in PHP and dynamic query generation", creating a "XSL-based Presentation Layer", as well as the creation of a "datalayer" (a database abstraction layer). Having personally worked with this technology already, I can definitely say that it is the next step in evolution for my PHP scripts, and has never made creating or updating a site easier (in fact, this very site uses PHP/XML/XSL to create each of the pages).