Even though interoperability and making systems and enterprises work together have been the main goals of XML and Web services technologies and standards, the quest for a better way to develop applications has led XML in another direction: around consuming XML/Web services to developing modular and dynamic user interfaces.

Standards like XForms, Web Services for Remote Portals, Web Services User Interface, and a whole slew of implementations - along with products such as Microsoft's recent addition to the Office Suite, InfoPath - take this approach further and allow business analysts to become the next-generation developers, or rather assemblers of dynamic applications.

If you are a member of the IT division of your company, I'm sure you've been bombarded with requests for "micro-applications" such as phone books, contact lists, lists of assets, and other such applications that, when drilled down into technical details, involve a simple mechanism for capturing and retrieving structured data in a user-friendly way. As technologists we have often taken these requirements and built either generic "e-forms" solutions or a custom specific solution, depending on our expertise level as well as the time allocated for doing the work. While implementing such micro-applications, we have often contemplated a simpler, more extensible, and better way to do this.

Enter XML, providing a portable document format that tags the data stored in it. Top it off with XML Schema, and we have defined the various error-checking mechanisms in the document. Web services are making a huge splash in the industry as we realize that they can be used as a portable, standard way of moving these "structured" tagged/typed documents around. The missing piece of the puzzle is an easy-to-use interface with which technology-savvy business analysts (rather than developers) can build their own micro-applications. InfoPath fits very nicely into this category. Although there have been a number of products/initiatives around this, Microsoft has truly captured the essence of usability to create a killer application. Although I don't like everything about InfoPath (for instance, we need a Web-based viewer/editor/control for InfoPath as well as alignment of the functionality with standards initiatives such as XForms), I truly consider it one of the best applications of XML and Web services. For more details, look no further - this issue includes a great introductory piece on InfoPath by Thom Robbins.

Another key development regarding e-forms is major announcements from Adobe regarding extensive support of XML in the Acrobat product line. With millions of Acrobat Readers installed on computers and devices (and available for a number of PDA platforms as well), PDF has definitely earned respect as a true portable document format. Mix XML with PDF, and what you get is a rich, structured, portable, and extensible document format. If you've ever interacted with a government agency, chances are that you've filled out a number of forms. Many government agencies have actually created forms that can be filled out and printed using Acrobat Reader. I can well imagine the day when government agencies will create XML-based forms defined using a schema and rendered through Acrobat Reader.

Going further, integration has brought our attention to real-time or batch transactional data integration from one system or partner to another. We're also seeing a number of developments around information and semantic integrations between multiple information sources. For instance, an industry-focused market trends report may be derived through mining a quarter-old data mart, watching a couple of Internet news feeds for third-party information on the source, and perhaps looking at an internal file store. Similar to the well-established EAI acronym, a new acronym - EII, which stands for Enterprise Information Integration - is coming into the limelight.

A number of key infrastructure/database vendors have introduced a slew of products around this phenomenon as well. XQuery, the upcoming W3C XML query language, is a standard that has received a lot of attention in this area as well - look for details on XQuery in the first installment of a two-part series in this issue.

Enjoy this issue of XML-Journal, as it takes you through the topics related to integration...and beyond.