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XML in enterprise applications. (Technology Trends).

Article Excerpt
Enterprise application systems--ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), etc.--have for decades run mission-critical systems for medium to large organizations. With their large breadth of integrated, prebuilt functionality these systems have been at the heart of the IT infrastructure. There's also been the constant challenge of integrating them with legacy/custom/homegrown systems as well as the e-business/edge applications and infrastructure. As architects and developers, we've spent sleepless nights trying to understand application-specific APIs, interface tables, file formats, and so on. The era of XML and Web services has given us hope, and we're seeing a movement toward decoupled interfaces based on XML messaging and eventually Web services.

To appreciate the value that XML brings to enterprise applications, I spoke with technology executives of leading enterprise application vendors who have started to see the benefits of their investments in technologies such as XML and Web services.

From Flat Files and APIs to XML and Web Services

Most application providers started providing interfaces to their applications using file exchange. Files in a particular format (which was often proprietary to the application vendor) were expected to be created by external applications and were to be consumed by, the application; similarly, on the outbound side they were created for consumption. With the advent of EDI, standard file formats based on EDI (with a lot of variations, of course) began to be utilized. To facilitate online or real-time integration, vendors then began exposing key abstractions of their functionality as Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). These were typically developed in C/C++ and ported across the various platforms supported by the vendor. In addition to these tightly coupled interfaces, a number of vendors also provided database drivers that typically allowed "read-only" access to the back-end data (as business rules to validate the data were typically encapsulated in either the GUI or the business functions). Another mechanism was that of an interface table, which allowed external applications to deposit external data into a set of RDBMS tables; it was then processed...

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