A new tutorial entitled Building XML Workflow Applications, written by XML industry guru, Dr. Michael Kay —  founder of Saxonica, the producer of the Saxon XQuery and XSLT processor — was announced today by Stylus Studio (http://www.stylusstudio.com), the industry-leading provider of XML development tools and components for advanced data integration.

 Dr. Kay is a member of the W3C committee on XQuery, XPath, and XSLT, and winner of the 2005 XML Cup award. Software developers and managers looking gain valuable insight into the design and architecture XML-based workflow applications, says Stylus Studio, are urged to read the new tutorial online today.

In the new article, Kay argues that the bulk of the application logic required for typical XML workflow applications can be written in high-level XML processing languages, notably XSLT and XQuery, with individual components linked together in a pipeline processing framework.

By writing the logic in these high-level languages (rather than say Java or C#), Kay contends that the biggest benefit you gain is flexibility and adaptability — the ability to change the application in response to changing business needs. XML gives you this flexibility in terms of data design, he notes, so developers shouldn't throw it away by writing applications that freeze the data structure into Java or C# classes.

Building XML Workflow Applications covers the following topics: