There is no doubt that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Schemas enjoy quite a success. They are used in many major software environments and are applied to many domains, from finance to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

This tutorial discusses the simpleType and complexType XML Schema structures and their corresponding representations in an XML document. XML Schema is used as the basis of an XML document structure, and some of the XML technologies, such as JAXB, are based on XML Schema.

This article demonstrates how we can integrate XSL-FO, XSLT, and JavaMail into our existing web-based applications. I show you how we can generate PDF reports for an application through the use of XSLT and XSL-FO embedded within the Java application. I also illustrate how the generated PDF file can be sent as an e-mail attachment using JavaMail.

Traditional development produces applications that are closed to wide usage. Custom development is required to open these programs to wide-scale integration. In contrast, Web services applications are by default open to other systems and additional configuration is required to block access.

One of the basic challenges of XML developers is formulating best practices and design guides for defining their XML content. In the financial industry, the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) Forum has been working for over seven years to develop a business message specification to satisfy the need for a community vocabulary and messaging specification in the retail and commercial banking arenas

For the biologist, the bioinformatic analysis of genes requires the compilation of tables of gene characteristics. To do this, data is often taken manually out of databases in an ad hoc fashion. Different databases (TIGR, MIPS, BLAIR, and NCBI, for example) give different outputs in different formats. We would like to be able to extract information from the databases in a common, structured file format in a way that allows for easy rearranging and processing of the data.

The emerging world without wires has fostered a growing number of small and mobile devices (everything from PDAs to smart phones) capable of accessing data and running applications. The trouble is, while devices are getting smaller, human hands and fingers are not.

In recent years the application server has greatly evolved, expanding the set of core services provided by the infrastructure. The current Java platform supports XML data handling, scalability, load balancing, and other capabilities that allow application-level services to be developed more easily and deployed more reliably. This progression must now address developers' latest concerns regarding security, distributed transactions, and reliable messaging because applications no longer stand alone - they're deployed into a technology ecosystem that can span departmental and organizational boundaries.

If you've been working with integration technologies for any length of time, you're well aware of the freight train of standards that has been careening through the industry during the last five years. These standards, particularly in the Web services space, are on the verge of doing to proprietary integration servers what SQL and J2EE standards did to database and middle-tier servers of days gone by.

Enterprise portals provide a single interface to aggregated and componentized information. They significantly reduce the navigational issues inherent with Web sites and make it easier to publish information from disparate sources. The basic building blocks of enterprise portals are portlets, which are reusable, personalized Web components displaying content from various data sources.

My colleague wrote an article for XML-J two years ago about an opportunity we had to solve our data management challenges with XML. The result of our work was our XML Data Services (XDS), an XML data access language and processing engine, which allowed us to quickly and easily manage the bi-directional transform between data sources and XML.

This article will explain how XML is used to enable businesses to work together via the Internet, in the context of the RosettaNet B2B framework. Looking at proven frameworks such as RosettaNet is important as it provides insight into what works today, and what will become important tomorrow.

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.

We all know that in today's threat-conscious world, communication is more than a convenience. To protect their organizations and the public in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist strike, or other significant threat, businesses and governments have been forced to reassess their ability to monitor events, notify key constituencies, and provide accurate and relevant information.

The transformation layer is the 'Rosetta stone' of the system. It understands the format of all information being transmitted among the applications and translates that information on the fly, restructuring data from one message so that it makes sense to the receiving application or applications.

This article addresses the problem of heterogeneous XML-based information integration within the enterprise. First we examine the business problem and the technology options currently available to build a solution. Next, we discuss how emerging XML-based technologies can be used to effectively solve the problem.

The whole point of teams is to allow different specialties to complement one another and achieve the extraordinary, so it can only be a good thing to reduce the barriers between them. This article shows how to eliminate the interdependency between HTML design skills and XML processing.

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.

XML signatures apply digital signatures to XML documents. Digital signatures let parties that exchange data ensure the identity of the sender and the integrity of the data. This last item is a benefit that physical signatures can't provide.