The should have named XML for eXchangeable Markup Language. The use of XML
for exchanging the information stored on servers is definitely where there's
money to be made on the web. Forget that portal popularity contest junk.
The longrunning popularity of a portal website is very unlikely, but the
information on it could be forever valuable. If you have information on
your website that is valuable, you can exchange it to the portals to display
on their own CPU time. If you're interested in an example of using XML for
cross language data exchange, check out http://www.wddx.org. WDDX supports
the easy exchange of data between JavaScript 1.x, ColdFusion 4.0, COM, Perl
and Java.
-Spike
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 1999 10:01 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Server-Side Java & XML why?
XML at the moment in our world has two major uses - the one that Mike
outlines here and data exchange.
Today the dominant application level network protocol is HTTP and more and
more companies rely on this. At the same time HTTP has limitations - it's
meant to transfer [hyper]text around (hence the 'H'). Many companies are
also relying on the internet to do e-commerce, and, since HTTP combined with
HTML is limited in what data can be passed, have started to use other
protocols. Unfortunately (in this case) network security people want to open
as few ports as possible (to the outside world) to limit possible security
holes, so it becomes very difficult to do RPC type work on the internet. One
solution to this is to use HTTP tunneling (ala COM Internet Services in NT4
SP5 and NT5, also Java RMI), but now the problem is that you pass binary
data in an unknown, or at least hard to parse format - again network
security managers hate this!
This is where XML enters the frame - it is hypertext (more so than HTML) so
HTTP can cope with it without any extensions - it's text, so no nasty binary
data getting through firewalls, it's easy to parse both by humans and
computers, so allows filtering and logging code to be written easily. XML is
easily extended, easy to manipulate and (partly because of the hype) has a
wealth of tools to manage the data.
One other thing - Java doesn't lend itself easily to cross-language
communication. OK we have CORBA and in the MS world COM but these tend to be
overkill in many scenarios. In this case think of XML as an object model,
where the XML supplies the data and the recieving (or sending) application
supplies the code. Now we have power - objects distributed not only within a
language but across languages, a truely language neutral RPC/Remote Object
mechanism,
Kevin
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