Aligning IT & Business: XML and Your Business

by Mike Sniezek
April 15, 2008

Are you dazed and confused about the pace of new Web technologies? Have you heard of XML for years, not really grasping its importance for managing Web-based applications? You’re not alone. This column discusses how business applications exploit XML technology now—and later. It explains why PureXML is the next step in merging relational data with what I like to call “Web-structured data.” XML data will ensure that your business can fit into Webbased business applications today and in the future.

Like everything else, technologies evolve. In 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed the basics of hypertext, and 45 years later, Tim Berners-Lee and others invented the World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP, and URLs. These languages and TCP/IP were used to create the phenomena we know today as the Web. The Web has evolved from simple Websites that did nothing but display information, to search engines, to commercial Websites, and now to the plethora of social Websites. New technology enabled these new uses. The problem is how to make all this stuff work together.

Web services is a collaborative effort to develop and maintain a set of standards that focus on interoperability. These standards allow for integration with internal and external applications using different technologies. XML is just one piece of this standard that solves the problem of data exchange and provides logical structure to a simple text file.

Here’s is a complete (but very simple) XML document:

<?xml version=”1.0”?>

<contact-info>

<name>mike Sniezek</name>

<company>BmC Software</company>

<phone>(713) 918-8800</phone>

</contact-info>

XML uses matching tags to define data. In this example

<contact-info> is the beginning tag and

</contact-info> is the ending tag; the various matching tags are known as elements. XML is self-describing as long as the tags make sense. The tags are flexible, but follow standard rules to define data. This XML document can be used by any application adhering to the rules of XML.

Web services standards support verification, search, and retrieval of the whole XML document or parts of the document. Pure XML allows for the manipulation of data in a stored XML document without having to take it apart and put it together again. This provides for an even more efficient way of using XML if the database engine supports this function. When you’re sharing XML documents between applications, something will eventually change, causing problems down the chain. To ensure this isn’t a problem, XML documents are matched up with an XML Schema that defines the structure of the data. The XML Schema Definition (XSD) can be passed to the other applications to ensure the structure of the data is validated.

XML can be used for more than just sharing data. Web applications can share data from other Web applications without having to worry about the source of the data. Data could be stored in a mainframe database, such as DB2 or IMS, in a distributed system database such as Oracle, or from a shared application from a partner’s Web application. Using XML separates the data from the application technology, allowing for more data to be used in many ways regardless of the processing or storage technology.