As the scope of enterprise integration grows, IT organizations are demanding greater efficiency and agility from their architectures and are moving away from point-to-point integration,which is proving to be increasingly cumbersome to build and maintain.

Traditional application development dictates that you define your data model first, and then design your applications around the data. As information changes and moves at ever-increasing speeds, being dependent on a rigid data model places a limit on how sophisticated integrated applic...

The object is certainly not a new concept, but Web services are considered new, difficult, and intimidating. Since a Web service can be thought of as a glorified object with standard interfaces, why isn't this old hat? Many of the difficulties of implementing services of any kind shoul...

XML databases are different from traditional databases, and they require a new set of features and metrics for evaluating them. In my last column (XML-J, Vol. 3, issue 2) I talked about native XML database management systems (XDBMS), and I'd like to follow up with how they differ from...

As XML is put into production more frequently, many of the XML software product categories are beginning to gain clarity. One area that has seen several new entries is the XML database management system, or XDBMS. The word native is frequently used when describing XML database manageme...

Now that the age of limitless optimism is over and it's trendy to be cynical, I hear many Web services cynics remark that there's nothing new here. They're just components. Been there, done that, and in fact we called it CORBA (or COM). This leads to the inevitable questions about what...

As the hype surrounding Web services continues to swirl, I'd like to talk about when to choose a Web service over the many other communication options available. I'll start at the abstract level, looking at appropriate business objectives, and then sum up with a divide-and-conquer appr...

In my last column (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 1) I talked about Web services and how they can change the way we think about e-business and application development. This month I'd like to elaborate on a few points and examine some of the market benefits in greater depth.

I was looking through my previous column and was struck by two things. First, how there always seems to be a next level - it wasn't too long ago that we were awestruck by the fact that XML could represent actual data with those neat little tags. Now we're talking about representing ent...

In my last column, instead of talking about XML as a technology, I discussed the business benefits of this wonderful and distinctly different language and focused on B2B applications as that's where XML has established a firm foothold. Now I'd like to continue the discussion in that v...

Lo and behold! XML has found a home and is beginning to make an impact on the enterprise. XML used to be considered fabulously interesting (like a degree in philosophy); now it's considered an essential item in everyone's bag of tools (like a wrench). As this technology hits the next l...

In my last column (XML-J, Vol. 1, issue 1) I talked about XML's extensibility and how it's the key to building dynamic systems. But that begs the question: Does the freedom to extend a data structure create new opportunities, or is it another example of flexibility run amok?

XML-J: Would you care to comment on the state of XML technology in the industry today? Jaenicke: The official 'state' of XML is that it's been accepted, but I don't think it's well understood. Most IT managers and project leaders have XML on some checklist somewhere, but few have yet i...

As XML survives its debutante ball and begins to be accepted by mainstream IT shops, it's being put to work, creating excitement among CIOs with its extensibility. Having had first-hand experience with several next-generation XML e-business application deployments, I'd like to describe...