We're all hoping for a revolutionary year for the economy and the world of i-technology in particular. The New Year also marks an important phenomenon: all of us try to have a New Year's resolution (mine is to gain fame and riches in the world of i-technology). And of course, we tend to think of the events that marked the previous year as well as what's in store for the coming year. Here we'll look at how 2002 steered XML into the world of i-technology, and project the path of XML in 2003.

Standards
The success of XML has often been attributed to the development of standards. Whereas the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has taken on the responsibility of the core set of standards around XML, a number of other organizations have been formed to jump-start related horizontal- or vertical-focused standards development. OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has been instrumental in developing vocabularies based on XML. 2002 marked the establishment of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), chartered to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, applications, and programming languages.

W3C
The standardization work at W3C follows a known path. W3C Working Groups take the development of a standard through a series of stages: Working Draft, Last Call Working Draft, Candidate Recommendation, Proposed Recommendation, and W3C Recommendation. Related to XML activities, 2002 marked the release of XML Encryption, XML Decryption, XML Signature, and Exclusive XML Canonicalization as W3C Recommendations. SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG were upgraded to Proposed Recommendation status while SOAP 1.2, Namespaces in XML 1.1, XForms, XML 1.1, and XInclude were released as Candidate Recommendations.

Apart from these Recommendations, 2002 also marked the development of key standards that are still in the Working Draft status, particularly MathML 2.0, XHTML 2.0, Voice Browser Activity (Speech Synthesis Markup Language, VoiceXML 2.0, CCXML, SVG 1.2, XQuery, XSLT/XPath 2.0, OWL, Web Services Architecture, RDF Schema, DOM Level 3, XML Accessibility Guidelines, XML Events and XFrames and WSDL 1.2).

OASIS
Key standards earning the "OASIS Standard" stamp included SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), ebXML Messaging Service Specification, ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement, ebXML Registry Service, and Information Model and Directory Services Markup Language (DSML). A number of other OASIS Technical Committees (TCs) were in the news, particularly Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP), Universal Business Language (UBL), Topic Maps, RELAX NG, LegalXML (Legal Information Exchange), Open XML Format for Office Applications, Tax XML, Web Service for Translation, and XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF).

Also, UDDI.org, which heads the development of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard, transitioned and integrated its standardization activity with OASIS.

Other Initiatives
Apart from the standardization work carried by W3C and OASIS, 2002 also saw standardization work by the SALT Form (to develop Speech Application Language Tags); Liberty Alliance released 1.1 specifications; and RELAX NG, the next-generation schema language for XML, was released as a draft ISO standard.

Beyond Web: XML to Go
XML in speech recognition
There was a great deal of interest in applying XML standards to opening up the Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) industry. The VoiceXML Forum had already developed the initial version (VoiceXML 1.0) of an XML-based speech dialog and synthesis specification. With a memorandum of understanding, the W3C Voice Browser activity was put in charge of the development of VoiceXML 2.0. In addition to VoiceXML, Microsoft spearheaded the development of Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) through the SALT Forum organization. SALT, which shares a number of similarities with VoiceXML, is also set to promote the notion of a multimodal interface where speech can be used as one of the interfaces. The SALT Forum submitted its specification to the W3C. We also witnessed the creation of XHTML+Voice, a standard built on top of XHTML and VoiceXML to provide multimodal activity as well.

Wireless applications
We have also seen the convergence of the wireless and Web standards with the creation of WAP 2.0. By leveraging XHTML, WAP 2.0 attempts to unify the Web and wireless standards. Whether it be companies or standards, consolidation is the key. Last year saw the formation of Open Mobile Alliance, Ltd., an organization formed with the consolidation of multiple wireless initiatives including WAP Forum, Open Mobile Architecture, Location Interoperability Forum (LIF), Wireless Village, and SyncML.

XML for the Masses
At a recently held XML-focused conference, representatives from both Microsoft and Sun talked about using XML as the underlying format for office productivity suites. Late last year, Microsoft announced that Office 11, the latest reincarnation of its office productivity suite, would have an XML file format underneath it. We also saw the emergence of an OASIS technical committee chartered to develop an "Open Office XML File Format." The proposed XML file format is to be "suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents." Later in the year, Sun also fueled this work by contributing OpenOffice.org XML Format to the TC as well. However, whether both Microsoft and Sun will collaborate and agree on a joint file format is yet to be seen. Watch out, XML isn't just for programmers - it's going to be for the masses.

Web Services
Web services is tightly connected to XML. Without any doubt, XML has really made the entire Web services vision possible. At the same time, maybe as a payback, Web services is also emerging as probably the most recognized application of XML as well. The core Web services standards - SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI - have already been developed; however, what we saw in 2002 was sort of ownership changes. SOAP was released as a W3C Candidate Recommendation, and development of UDDI was transferred to OASIS, which has already been developing the ebXML set of open standards.

It's important to understand that even though integrating systems is really what the Web services architectures have been utilized for today, applications of Web services aren't limited to application-to-application integration. This was further highlighted by emergence of two OASIS technical committees in this direction: Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) and Web Service User Interface (WSUI).

In 2002, a major amount of development around Web services involved modeling and executing business processes using a standard that orchestrates a set of related Web services together to form a business process. A whole new alphabet soup was spilled in this arena, with the emergence a of number of initiatives related to this activity. Key to those are BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI), BMPL (Business Process Markup Language), and so on. One standard that seems to have a lot of activity is BPEL4WS, which has been jointly developed by IBM, Microsoft, and BEA.

In addition to BPEL4WS, the trio (IBM, Microsoft, and BEA) also collaborated together to spearhead development on related Web services initiatives, WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction. Later in the year, IBM and Microsoft also announced development of another set of standardization initiatives related to Web services security. WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, and WS-PolicyAssertions were developed in collaboration with BEA, RSA, and SAP.

Industry Applications
Since the conception of XML, a number of industry organizations have come forward and started applying XML in their own industries. Last year wasn't different in this regard. A number of industries, including retail, travel, financial services and banking, health care, chemical, petroleum, agricultural, pharmaceutical, legal, biometrics, press, human resources, and automotive, either announced vocabulary standardization initiatives or built on top of existing work. Table 1 highlights some of the initiatives of various industries.

Product Initiatives
The last year saw a strong lineup of products related to XML. No doubt support for XML in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org topped the news. The "XML for Masses" philosophy was adopted by Adobe, which announced support of XML in its print media products, an area where I see a lot of possible growth. (Adobe announced XML export/import capability in its FrameMaker and InDesign products.) Also, we saw a rise in native XML storage products - whether it was existing relational or OODBMS vendors or new niche vendors claiming optimized XML storage and indexing.

2002 Favorites
Looking back, my favorite developments in the XML world in 2002 were:

XML to be more widely adapted in media (integration with publishing systems), acceptance/developments in standards such as XSL-FO.

Published Jan. 31, 2003 — Reads 7,532
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About Hitesh Seth
Hitesh Seth is chief technology officer of ikigo, Inc., a provider of XML-based web-services monitoring and management software. A freelance writer and well-known speaker, he regularly writes for technology publications on VoiceXML, Web Services, J2EE and Microsoft .NET, Wireless Computing & Enterprise/B2B Integration. He is the conference chair for VoiceXML Planet Conference & Expo.