Workshop 2 - continuing with the weather feed.

Last week you wrote a PHP script using SimpleXML to fetch an RSS feed from the BBC and formatted a page to display the forecast which was embedded in the RSS.

You noted that the way detailed weather data was handled by the three feeds (The Weather Channel, BBC and Yahoo) were very different and illustrate the point that merely using XML doesn't solve problems of communicating complex data. We also encountered problems with namespaces and attributes with the Yahoo feed. However the worksheet is about the BBC feed so we will avoid this problem for the moment.

In the last part of the work sheet, it asks you to parameterise the script so it can be used for different locations, identified by name This is a problem because the feeds are identified by an id internal to the BBC.

To solve this problem you can add your own data file which contains pairs of Place names and the corresponding BBC code. This data could be held in any of several forms - as a simple text file, as a MYSQL table but for this part of the course, you will create a small XML file to hold these pairs and then use a bit of XPath to find the matching record.

We will cover the basics of XPath in the lecture and how it is used in SimpleXML.

Next week we will be looking at creating more complex XML - kml files to create overlays for Google Earth. In preparation, please take a look at the introduction to GoogleEarth in this blog.