While EDI transactions account for most worldwide commercial activity, XML-based alternatives are beginning to gain traction. According to Forrester Research, stateful XML, stateless XML, and even flat file exchanges are all projected to grow at a faster rate than EDI over the next few years. The firm predicts stateful XML transactions will be required for a growing number of B2B process-oriented transactions and are projected to exceed the growth of EDI transactions over the next five years.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references [1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007, supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0.

With an XML-capable service, developers don't have to make alterations to enterprise applications, nor do they need to create a completely separate application to map from one system to the other. The faxes are transmitted to and received from the Internet fax service as XML documents, greatly simplifying handling on both ends.

Prior to the year 2000, business was a world in love with office spaces and corporate travel. We traveled to work (the office) every day. We traveled away from the office for customer meetings, for internal meetings, for conferences, for awards ceremonies. We traveled because we could and we believed that it was necessary for the competitive advantage. That all changed rather quickly with the economic downturn of the early 2000s and, of course, 9/11. In short order, we relearned how to do business by staying put.

Since its inception XML has at times been seen as the cure-all for every problem related to Web applications and integration projects. However, poorly written XML can either slow down an integration project, or worse, cause the integration project to collapse.

With the evolution of XML, the XSL standard also became very popular for transforming XML data to XML, text, PDF, etc. However there are some limitations to the XSLT transformation. Today's XSLT processors rely on holding input data in memory as a DOM tree while the transformation is taking place. The tree structure in memory can be as much as ten times the original data size, so in practice, the limit on data size for an XSLT conversion is just a few megabytes. As a result it can only handle XML documents with moderate size - to be processed as the full input, DOM needs to be in the memory for any XSL transformation.

Corporations have a tremendous amount of stored information. On top of this, new information is being created every day. A small but critical portion of this information is stored in highly structured and well-defined formats in relational databases. However, most of the information is on paper, in e-mail, in word processing documents, in spreadsheets, in PDF files, in engineering diagrams, and so on.

XML Development - the term can mean many different things given the technologies currently available. At the center of it all is XML Schemas, DTDs and instance documents. Building out from the base there's XSL, Web Services and XQuery just to name a few. Because of this, it's not uncommon for a developer to have several tools, each specialized in one of those technologies. Stylus Studio, however, provides an integrated environment for XML development with broad support for the various technologies. This review covers its capabilities in some of the major areas.

Highly scalable implementations of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) always include heavy doses of caching. A guided tour through the SOA tiers, describing the caching and XML acceleration techniques employed along the way, provides the SOA enterprise architect with an awareness of optimization possibilities applicable to a Web service infrastructure. Consolidating the acceleration functions in an integrated appliance and controlling them via policies specified by WSDL annotations simplifies the implementation.

Much time, energy, and commitment are required to develop and sell successful software products and Web-based services. Most products of this type are initially developed for a specific language and locale (e.g., U.S. English). To maximize return on investment, products can be customized so they may be available to the largest possible market - the global market. This customization process is known as localization.

Code-generation tools are capable of significantly impacting productivity and are now an essential part of a developer's tool set. There are two categories of transformation tools: those whose output is used by software components, and those whose output is used by developers. With tools that generate output for developers, it becomes important to properly design the input to these tools so that the output is comprehensible and usable, and the input is maintainable by developers. Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) is one such tool that takes an XML Schema file as input, and transforms this input into a Java class model that is usable directly by a developer.

In Part 1 of this series we discussed some of the key problems of capturing and sharing information and in Part 2 we looked at the critical components of a solution: modularization, automation, and XML.

Moving information from a database into an application may be the most common challenge developers face. How many of us make it through life without meeting object/relational (O/R) mapping in some form? Certainly not too many. Lately it has become equally difficult to avoid XML/relational (X/R) mapping. Because XML, and especially XML Schema (XSD), are object-like paradigms, the mapping difficulty is approximately the same. However, under the ever-expanding influence of XML, the extract, transform, load process that gets data from a database into an application (and vice versa) may be about to get radically more simple and declarative.

Two somewhat contrary-sounding drivers fuel the emerging renaissance in enterprise data management - virtualization and convergence. Virtualization is a framework for dividing up the resources of an organization into multiple execution environments through the application of one or more technologies such as hardware clustering, software partitioning, application modularization, emulation, and so on. Convergence, on the other hand, tries to bring diverse information assets - databases, mail stores, documents - under unified management. The coming Information Grid unites these opposing drivers.

Integrating mainframe applications into an SOA often carries the burden of dealing with metadata in the form of Cobol Copybooks. This metadata converted to an XML Schema format can be useful for a range of applications (from validation to creation of services). This article explains how to automate the conversion from Copybooks to XML Schema using regular expression logic.

Due to the great increase of data in XML format, companies increasingly have to face the issue of how to manage this data efficiently. To do this it is important to take advantage of XML's potential, and to integrate with applications that access data stored in relational database management systems (RDBMS).

Mae West said, 'When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.' But, sometimes, when choosing between two equally appealing options, the best policy is to take both. WS-ResourceFramework and WS-Transfer, two new specifications for accessing XML representations of resources through Web Services have been announced.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed some of the key problems of capturing and sharing information - problems like delivering information to multiple types of media, making updates faster and easier, and reducing the cost and time to translate and publish. Given those challenges, what should we do? In this part, we'll describe the essentials for solving these problems, which include building a 'single source' of information that eliminates redundancy, creating information in reusable modules, and automatically assembling and publishing information for multiple audiences and multiple media. Let's take a trip through the Wayback Machine to 1960. You find yourself responsible for publishing a technical manual. You begin the project by figuring out what information the book will contain and assigning various sections to subject matter experts (SMEs). The SMEs are mostly engineers, and they write out their content in longhand on foolscap. (If you don't know that 'foolscap' is writing paper, congratulate yourself on your youth and vitality.) The secretarial pool types out the handwritten notes from the engineers. An editor - that's your job too - reviews and edits those typewritten notes and then sends them back to the secretarial pool to re-type.

Will many of the features in XML Schema be widely used? In particular, I agree that it is better to have an XML language for specifying document layout rather than the DTD language. On the other hand, I am not sure that the document layout should be strongly typed. The nightmare scenario is where a customer cannot place a large order because an XML document is invalid.

The Department of Defense (DoD) Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) describes the DOD's preferred approach for decorating data assets with metadata. By providing a common convention for metadata, the DoD is building a common system for asset discovery, search, description, consumption, and security.

How important are data considerations to service-oriented architectures (SOA) vending Web services? Consider the following definition of Web services from AMR Research: 'Web services have been commonly defined as a standardized way of integrating applications using Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standards.

The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) specification provides for morphing XML documents into other XML documents. An XML document can also be transformed into a format other than XML such as HTML or text. An XSLT processor is required for an XSLT transformation. Some of the commonly used XSLT processors include Xalan-Java, Oracle XSLT Processor for Java and the JAXP XSLT transformer. A stylesheet is used to transform an XML document.

SOAP is an XML based data protocol standardized by W3C for the purpose of enabling inter-application data exchange over the Internet. In a typical Web Services scenario, a SOAP message delivered via HTTP needs to be parsed before anything else can happen. As two popular SOAP processing methods, DOM and SAX/Pull force application developers to choose between performance/memory efficiency and ease of use.

Enterprise applications such as banking, healthcare, and so on still use flat files to import/export data between applications. Flat files contain machine-readable data that is typically encoded in printable characters. There is a growing need for these applications to interact with XML-aware applications and Web services, and to satisfy this need these applications must convert flat file data to an XML format.

Before the information age, car manufacturers only made cars, libraries only stored books, and newspapers only printed the news. Now, however, companies from all industries are realizing that in addition to what they do, they are also publishers, and there is a learning curve.

Programming techniques continue to evolve, and with evolution comes opportunity. The success of the Web, in conjunction with the demand for rich clients and rapid development, has spawned a new generation of declarative languages. XUL, Macromedia's Flex, Microsoft's XAML, and Xamlon, Inc.'s Xamlon Pro 1.1 are designed to enable rapid, XML-based application develoment with access to structured programming languages for application logic.

XMLBeans is an open source XML-Java binding tool used to generate Java classes and interfaces from an XML Schema. The generated Java classes may be used to parse or generate an XML document that conforms to the Schema. Some of the advantages of XMLBeans over JAXB are the ability to parse an XML document and support for all of the XML Schema constructs; the JAXB-generated classes do not have a parse method to parse an XML document, and JAXB does not support all of the Schema constructs.

The XML world is driving new emerging technologies that can be utilized to provide solutions to a variety of problems. This article focuses on two of these technologies: Web services and XQuery. As separate entities, these technologies provide a powerful set of features; but when combined they have the potential to present ever more sophisticated feature sets designed for very specific goals.

Web services represent an evolution of the original Web because the Web becomes accessible by any program and not just a browser. The Web is no longer just a front end infrastructure for an often complex Web enabled-application. An existing Web site can be retrofitted to publish a Web services API, simplifying programmatic access to the facility enormously. This has happened with well-known sites such as www.amazon.com and www.google.com. Programmatic access to Web functionality encourages building applications by composing services.

Are you just beginning to try to figure out how XML and content management can help you wrestle with your publishing problems? Are you confused by all the jargon and acronyms that the experts are throwing around? Do you wish that someone would clear it all up for you? If so, then this 4-part series of articles is for you.

XML's surface-level simplicity hides a deceptively complex beast. At first glance, creating an XML document does not take a lot of effort. Create some tags, ensure they are well-formed, and that's it. Throw in a DTD or Schema and now there are a set of rules against which the document can be validated. There is an innumerable amount of XML documents created in the world today in this manner. And for many scenarios, this is a perfectly reasonable approach.

It is well known that traversing the XML DOM is a sometimes difficult and often tedious task. Executing code based on data retrieved from the DOM is even more complex. This article will demonstrate one way to abstract much of the logic from this repetitive task. The implementation of patterns is a technique that is often used to help simplify and intellectually manage projects, and the Visitor Pattern is appropriate and useful to help solve this problem.

Application integration comes in many forms, whether it be integration between components of a single software system or integration between systems. Making use of a common communications protocol between disparate systems allows for the creation of an integrated suite of applications whereby the combined benefits exceed those of each of the stand-alone applications.

Reporting is an important functionality in software business applications and is now increasingly required for XML data. Applications typically generate reports by extracting relevant information from a database.

Citrix Systems, Inc., the global leader in access infrastructure solutions, is one of the top 15 software companies in the world. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Citrix has offices in 22 countries around the world and conducts over half of its business outside the United States.

It's virtually axiomatic: technology innovations first boost personal productivity then group productivity. The PC, for example, first helped individuals automate writing, accounting and personal organization functions, then spawned group productivity through networks, the Internet and e-commerce.

The way XML has been positioned over the last several years - namely, as some type of savior for companies that have invested in myriad systems with numerous incompatible data types - it makes you wonder why organizations aren't adopting any XML solution they can get their hands on.

This article looks in detail at how to generate XML data from your relational database. Although the examples were run on Oracle, very little of the code is Oracle specific. You can easily use all the ideas and examples presented here in other relational databases. We did this project at University of Massachusetts Boston as part of the Electronic Field Guide (EFG) project.

Should emergency personnel and law enforcement be called to the scene of a suspected chemical warfare attack, the last thing these frontline workers will want to do is wrestle with incompatible IT systems. Therefore, the federal government is in the throes of linking databases scattered throughout the 22 agencies that now make up the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while tying in the efforts of state and local entities.