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XML and integration. (Industry Report).

Article Excerpt
Better known in the i-technology world as enterprise application integration (EAI), B2B integration, or middleware, integration involves connecting internal systems with external business partners, customers, and suppliers. Integrating systems running on heterogeneous platforms, typically developed in different programming environments and managed by different groups (or different companies), is quite a complex task.

And guess what technology has been used to solve this complex problem? XML. Truly, the integration services space is probably the largest application area of XML. XML provides the world of integration with an open and extensible standard to define and implement loosely coupled business documents and processes.

To appreciate the value that XML brings to integration, I decided to talk with leading integration software providers who have used XML in various incarnations (a.k.a. markups) within their products and have extensively leveraged the benefits of XML.

Self-Describing Data Is the Key

Not surprisingly, there was a consensus among competitive vendors about what has been the biggest benefit of using XML in their core technologies. XML's success as the open-standard mechanism for self-describing data is most significant. The ability to carry metadata with data is particularly important in integration that involves sharing data within a heterogeneous environment where there isn't even a basic common element, such as data types. This "data-typing" information (XML Schemas) allows data to be efficiently routed and processed intelligently. This is a radically different approach to solving the integration problem--before XML, integration was all about connecting individual systems to each other, in most cases using a proprietary mechanism.

Toward Loosely Coupled Architectures

Another fundamental reason XML is important, which builds on the fact that it is self-describing, is that by using XML we're able to facilitate a document-centric, loosely coupled model for integration instead of the more tedious RPC/API-centric model. This model resembles in many ways how enterprises have functioned for years using a paper-based (document) model. This approach makes integration a lot easier to sell to businesses that conceptually agree...

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