Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise.

Imagine a customer has hired you to put together a solution for managing a huge quantity of XML information. The firm's team is using XML because it gives them flexibility in how the data is structured. They like the fact that they do not need to specify a given record structure up front, and they can change the XML structure of records whenever they need to.

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable.

Product information is one of the few remaining strategic information assets within an enterprise that does not have a dedicated system of record. This is not surprising when one considers the complexities of product information management (PIM). Specifically, a comprehensive product information management application must be able to handle structured and unstructured information, share data, accommodate a variety of constantly changing data models, manage multiple inter-relationships, and enable multiple hierarchies, all without duplication of data.

Community integration elevates collaborative commerce to a new level of integration between enterprises. XML-based document exchanges between companies impose new challenges on organizations building a B2B community integration solution.

XML is the appropriate format for semistructured data, that is, data with a natural tree structure. Trees are a special form of graphs, and a dialect of XML called GraphML now exists that provides a standard set of tags for describing them.

Central Hudson Gas and Electric, a New York State utility company, wanted to find a way to improve its customer service by creating a Web-based platform where customers could view and retrieve bills online. Replacing or rewriting the company's 20-year old mainframe billing application wasn't an option.

More and more companies are experiencing a need to effectively manage ever-changing content on high-traffic Web sites. These high-traffic sites receive as many as 1 million hits per day and require significant amounts of technical and financial support.

Popular wisdom dictates that governments are slow to adopt anything new, especially when it comes to new technologies. But if you look closely, you might find something unexpected.

As information technology professionals progress in their knowledge and use of XML and Web services, the question of XML performance persists. In hallway chats, one might hear that 'XML takes up too much bandwidth' or 'XML takes too many CPU cycles to process.'

The good news about XML and Web services is that they're easier than ever to develop and deploy - inside the firewall between internal applications, on the Internet with your customers and partners...anywhere.

At the heart of any software program lies data, and in the case of Web services and service-oriented solutions this is presented to the underlying software as XML documents. The representation and handling of these documents within the software is a major challenge with traditional development approaches, and often leads to complicated collections of software programs interfering with the clear flow of business information through an application.

XML is establishing itself as the standard for exchange of information across enterprises. However, the technology that allows enterprise-class applications to deal with XML processing is still not clearly formulated.

XML seems to be popping up everywhere. In this article, I'm going to touch on an often overlooked but potentially very powerful use for XML technology: XML for project management and documentation.

Java Data Objects (JDO) enables Java developers to perform database transactions from within Java objects without writing database (SQL)- or JDBC-specific code. Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) and JDO provide great APIs for performing complex XML- and database-oriented tasks.

Creating Web pages with HTML can be time consuming, so it's critical to create generic visual components that can easily be reused. This will give you a consistent look and feel throughout your application.

With the downturn in the IT industry, employers are getting hundreds of resumes for new job openings. The use of technical interviews and online assessment tools in screening job applicants is becoming very popular in the IT job market, and companies offering IT skills assessment solutions are emerging in the marketplace.

Developers are beginning to develop more sophisticated Web services, exchanging complex XML documents rather than simple parameter types. As this shift takes place, development teams begin to grapple with different approaches to designing these Web services interfaces through the use of WSDL.

In Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Vol. 4, issue 6) we looked at creating a solution that used a new product in the Microsoft Office System 2003 called InfoPath. In this installment, I'll show you how to extend the solution created in Part 1 using BizTalk Server 2004.

Today's software industry is moving fast to supply innovative technologies, new standards, and early customer case studies targeted at fulfilling the vision of Web services. But as these products, standards, and customers emerge, it is now time to move beyond using the simple term Web services - it really misrepresents what is starting to take shape in today's enterprise, the emergence of the enterprise service-based architecture.

What could be better for managing content than separating data from presentation? How about separating data from data? Believe it or not, XsLT can actually be used to allow for different levels of data abstraction. In practical terms, this can reduce the complexity of managing Web content by an order of magnitude and facilitate code reuse.

In Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Volume 4, issue 7) we outlined why a development group might consider alternative validation schemes. An example from our experience is applying work group rules to the process of XSD design. We said rules could take the form of a Schematron schema that would be applied when a developer validates an XSD against the schema for XSD.

Who doesn't love the service-oriented architecture (SOA)? You get efficiency in your application development, revolutionary ability to interoperate with partners and suppliers, and mastery over change management that was never before possible.

The future of Web presentation isn't high tech, it's high concept. And it's here today. It's not an information superhighway - it's an adaptive avenue. Flexible, Web-based presentation engines are creating new options for Web presentation.

If it is important that your XML documents are correct, catching mistakes early is, of course, much less costly than catching them later. This should not be news to any XML developer.

In this month's 'XML Certification Quizzer,' we are going to review some interesting aspects of the syntax of XML and related technologies. You can learn more about the syntax of the language by running the sample code in the questions with an XML parser or an XSLT processor. The skills you'll learn here will prepare you for IBM Test 141 on XML and related technologies.

XML is fast becoming an integral part of information management workflows in the financial services industry, and the trend is moving toward even wider adoption.

From the beginnings of the well-known 'Gang of Four' design patterns book to more recent publications on J2EE design patterns, the software industry has always tried to find ways to design frameworks, ideas, and concepts that could be used repeatedly. With the introduction of Web services technologies, the need for design patterns remains the same.

A few weeks ago I was meeting with the CIO of a local health care customer and his IT staff. They were explaining the various technology initiatives and projects that were occurring over the next year. What the CIO was the most proud of was that he had declared this a year of integration projects.

Since the dawn of the database era more than three decades ago, enterprises have been amassing an ever-increasing volume of information - both current and historical - about their operations. For the past two of those three decades, the database world has struggled with the problem of somehow integrating information that natively resides in multiple database systems or other information sources (Landers and Rosenberg).

Last month's column introduced you to the exam objectives for IBM Test 141 on XML and Related Technologies. This installment will present five more questions from the five different exam objectives. It can be used as a learning tool for people who are new to XML. If you are preparing for the exam, the article will help you review key concepts.

It's time for Web services to prove their worth. They've gained enough attention for people to stop and notice, to wait and expect, to speculate and argue...now it's time to show people what the fuss is all about. If the show fails to impress, Web services will slowly fizzle out like their predecessors.

Over the last few years, there have been significant developments in the XML world. Many enterprises have adopted XML for various purposes such as data transfer, reporting, client-tier presentation, server-to-server communication, and so on. The need for representing data in XML form is greater than ever.

This column has two objectives. The first is to help you prepare for IBM Test 141 on XML and related technologies. The second is to help you learn XML by offering tips for designing and optimizing XML solutions.

Web services are the new 'it' in the IT world, and vendors are rushing in to stake claims in this landscape, each with a different marketing spin on how they 'do Web services.' However, simply sending SOAP-based messages between machines is not really 'doing Web services'; this is a limited view that obscures the bigger picture.

When developing Web applications that use Java and XML there are many options, including (among others) the Apache Struts framework and the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) language.

In 1975 Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist who created the Pascal programming language, published a seminal book entitled Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. If Wirth had written about business applications, Computing + Storage = Applications would have been a better title. Of course, in 1975 there weren't that many business applications. Most of them ran limited back-office functions on mainframes. PCs weren't on the map. The killer app for PCs - the first spreadsheet - wouldn't be created until 1981.

No, Web services isn't just hype. This series of articles will show you that Web services are real and can provide great benefits to organizations today. The series demonstrates how to build a real-world Web service by combining the features of Web services with components and knowledge of RosettaNet, an industry leader in e-business process standards.

XML Schemas provide the grammar and constraints of XML documents. Given the increasing prevalence of XML as a data and command transport format in enterprise software systems across industries, it's important to have a methodology when designing the structure of the XML you will create.

Over the past two decades, the life sciences industry has taken a dramatic leap into an online, collaborative world. Tasks and activities that are commonplace today were either extremely difficult or outright impossible just 20 years ago. One key reason for this shift was the abundance of genomic sequence data, the sequence of base pairs that make up an organism's DNA.