It seems that the only constant in life is change - sometimes the change is unexpected, unwanted, unwarranted. The tragic events of September 11 have left their mark. As I sat down to write this month's editorial, my mind wandered back to the way life was, and how it's changed for all of us.

At SYS-CON we felt that the best way to deal with the changes was to continue business as usual, thus defying the acts that took place a few weeks ago, acts that threatened to disrupt life in the U.S. After taking everything into account, we decided to go ahead with the XMLEdge and Web Services Edge West conference scheduled to take place this month in Santa Clara - specifically, October 22-25. By the time you get this issue, I'm sure we will have had a successful conference with participation from technologists and businesspersons who continue to contribute to initiatives in the realm of XML and Web services under all circumstances.

Not surprisingly, we have received questions about continuing with the events in the face of the tragedy. As you may know, our sister conference, JDJEdge and Web Services Edge East, took place as planned from September 23 to 26. We had a very good turnout, despite the circumstances. But both the U.S. president and the mayor of New York have urged the country to go about the business of doing business, and we concur with those sentiments.

In this editorial I'd like to address a few misconceptions and myths that are emerging around XML. The first one is that it's slow. True, XML is slower than compressed binary formats. But the key here is to identify what type of data needs to be expressed in XML. If you're transporting large chunks of data that aren't processed within a programming language environment and that deal with proprietary parsing only at both ends, there's no need to express that data in XML. XML should be used to format data that is to be shared among different applications that use a common vocabulary for expressing and interpreting the data.

Another criterion to keep in mind is that since the primary benefit XML provides over binary representations is that it is human readable, applications that don't require humans to see the data may not need to use XML. There's no "one shoe fits all" concept. For that matter, we assemble it much faster than compiled languages, but not every application requires assembly programming.

Another misconception is that XML is used only for formatting data that's transported across the Web. While this is one of the uses, there are others. For example, all the application server vendors are moving toward using XML for expressing design and runtime properties for application development and are moving away from the original properties files.

Nowadays XML is linked primarily to languages like C# and Java. However, it's also used with C++ (check out Fabio Arciniegas's book, C++ XML) as well as environments like CORBA for distributed computing.

Finally, due to the traction in Web services, there's a general feeling that Web services will be the only application components that XML is suited for. This isn't true either. XML finds expression in several facets of computing (e.g., MathML) that may need to be expressed as Web services. That said, XML definitely provides the building blocks for Web services.

At JDJEdge in September I met Rick Ross, president of Usermagnet and founder of JavaLobby. We had an interesting discussion on how XML and related technologies are used to address real-world issues. The case in point is the Usermagnet site http://vigil.usermagnet.com/ that acts as a content portal for America's "Vigil on Terrorism." It's powered by XML and Java - an example of state-of-the-art technology for the latest information. Check it out.