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XML -- beyond transport: persistence for Web services. (web services).

Article Excerpt
The computing world is now positioned to deliver on its unmet promise of lowering the cost of doing business and providing the enterprise with easy access to additional markets. The computer industry finds itself in the third of three significant waves in the deployment of new software infrastructure that enables this promise -- the adoption of the Internet, the expansion of mobile services, and now the move to Web services.

The first two waves were required to open access to and for the enterprise and its suppliers, vendors, and customers. The third is a novel approach to execution of new business models and offerings over a new and distributed means of access. This new model enables the consolidation and view of business information, opening a new vista for collaborative commercial exploitation.

The result is a convergence of software infrastructure and application development from point products to broader platform solutions -- a move from tightly coupled synchronous architectures to loosely coupled asynchronous architectures. This enables collaborative applications that can manage information derived from unknown heterogeneous sources, respond in kind, and support disparate applications and business processes on common data views. Web services, unlike previous attempts at distributed computing, are designed to take full advantage of the architecture and standards behind the Internet, a requirement for broad adoption. Furthermore, Web services can be built using a number of underlying technologies, platforms, and programming languages, and can expose existing IT functionality, assuring nearly ubiquitous deployment over the next decade. XML is a key enabling technology necessary to achieve this third wave.

XML Changes Everything

Few technologies and standards have exploded through the marketplace as XML has over the last few years. XML is technically not a language itself, but a metalanguage, a means to create other markup languages. Industry groups have created hundreds of industry- and domain-specific markup languages in an effort to standardize the means of communication within and beyond corporate walls. The use of XML as a means of standards-based transport between and within corporations is growing rapidly. However, XML's true power has yet to unfold.

For the first time in computing history, XML provides a widely adopted means to express "information," not just "data." Information is data with context. Since an XML document carries complete context with data, it is self-describing. Unlike traditional data representation models, such as relational or object models, in which the structure must be predefined, an XML...

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