The XML player is a simple HTML player that provides options for viewing and posting player XML. It is part of HTMLPlayer.dll and is used by the UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool for running interviews for load testing. You can use it to write similar applications of your own; for example, you can develop an UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer client that runs via HTTP, takes advantage of load-balancing implemented on the Web tier, and uses XML player to answer each page.

The advantage of running against the player XML is that the information for each question is richer and easier to work with than the HTML produced by the HTML player. In the case of the UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool, the player XML is read from the page, answered by the Auto Answer component, and then submitted.

The main disadvantage is that it is not SOAP based: the back-end of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer is SOAP based, and SOAP provides an easy-to-use building platform that wraps up all of the methods, gives you error handling, and so on. Other disadvantages are that you need to write the code to read the HTML and post it back using HTTP post syntax (double-escaping things with form encoding), and you need to write your own logic for handling errors.