What's all this XML talk?
The original name of BI Publisher was XML Publisher. The original name emphasized the basis of the tool--XML. At its debut, it was one of the only, if not the only tool that leveraged the power of the XML open standard to retain its core metadata. This is still true, even though the name of the tool has changed. XML is ubiquitous throughout the Web. Just about all major report vendors and web technologies can consume, parse, or otherwise leverage XML to produce dynamic information. A good example of this would be the Portable Document Format (PDF) standard, with which BI Publisher interacts seamlessly.
The basic development functionality of BI Publisher is straightforward and provides excellent results. However, the greatest flexibility of developing with BI Publisher comes when knowledge about advanced XML formatting can be leveraged. In BI Publisher's core all details, datasets, templates, and other data are stored as XML. These XML files can be manipulated...
