John Evdemon

XML can be thought of as the "universal serialization of data." It provides a flexible, open approach for modeling data and sharing messages among business partners (or systems) in a consistent manner. XML provides the ideal solution to messaging in a B2B e-commerce infrastructure since it enables a loosely coupled design that can significantly lower a partner's barrier to entry. While most users of XML utilize its hierarchical nature to define data, this article discusses possible approaches for eliminating redundant data within XML messages by employing the features of ID and IDREF to define a more relational approach to defining the data. Reporting Data Is Redundant Developing a common vocabulary for a single enterprise or a large B2B marketplace can be a daunting task. With XML the challenge of modeling commonly utilized data models in an open manner can be resolv... (more)

jAllora by HiTSoftware

HiT Software provides a line of standards-based XML and SQL middleware for application development and systems integration. HiT's Allora product line provides bidirectional XML access to databases and supports standard DOM/SAX parsers and, optionally, is accessible via SOAP interfaces (JMS support is also available). jAllora is the Java-based version of HiT's Allora middleware product and provides an easy-to-use and -understand approach to serializing relational data into an XML format (a version of Allora, winAllora, is also available for the Windows platform). Pros Easy to inst... (more)

XML-J '2.0': Enabling the Extensible Enterprise

Written by John Evdemon XML-Journal recently posted a special article online (at www.sys-con.com/xml) celebrating XML's fourth birthday. It's hard to believe the little toddler has grown up to become a preschooler. When XML was first introduced back in February 1998 it was designed to be a Web-based version of SGML. Indeed, the W3C XML Technical Recommendation states its goal as enabling a "generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML." XML is a subset of SGML. Much the way Java preserved the best parts of C++ concepts a... (more)

REST & Pneumatic Tube Systems

It's often said that history repeats itself - and by studying history we gain better insight into our current (and future) society. In the late 1800s the telegraph was immensely popular, but telegraphs only connected telegraph offices. Messages still had to be transcribed into a paper format and delivered to the appropriate person. Delivering them was a problem due to transportation costs, personnel costs, and time lost between transcription and delivery. Pneumatic tube systems were developed to transport documents within a building or across an entire city (London had a tube sy... (more)

Tracking the Evolution of XML

The XML 1.0 Technical Recommendation was approved in 1998, with a corrective release (termed the "Second Edition") in 2000. The popularity of XML and XML-related initiatives has far surpassed the expectations of the original XML Working Group. The XML 1.0 Technical Recommendation (TR) has been, without a doubt, one of the most popular and successful developments of the W3C. At the time of this writing, the XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation (CR) had just been released (you can find it at www.w3.org/TR/xml11). A CR is a W3C Working Draft's final step before being submitted to the d... (more)