Introduction

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is everywhere. Web services, web pages, COM components, database objects, and even the “next generation” of initialization files. XMLHTTP, however, isn’t. XMLHTTP is a set of API’s that allows us to send and retrieve data from and to a remote web server using its underlying HTTP protocols and methods.

The XMLHTTP Application Programming Interface is exposed through Microsoft’s XML library, MSXML. This is an extremely popular library for ASP, VB and C++ developers, and can be downloaded from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?url=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/766/msdncompositedoc.xml
At the time of writing, the current version of MSXML was 4.0.

To get the most out of this article, you should have access to a web server running IIS4/5 on Windows NT/2000. You should also download and install the latest version of the MSXML library, as mentioned above.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. XMLHTTP in a nutshell
3. Processing the request on the remote server
4. The XMLHTTP document headers
5. Conclusion

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