As the scope of enterprise integration grows, IT organizations are demanding
greater efficiency and agility from their architectures and are moving away
from point-to-point integration,which is proving to be increasingly
cumbersome to build and maintain.
They are migrating towards adaptive platforms such as BEA's 8.1 Platform and
many-to-many architectures that supports linear growth costs as well as
simplified maintenance. To connect systems, WebLogic developers are shifting
away from creating individual adapters between every pair of systems in favor
of Web services. For data, they are shifting away from individual mappings
between data sources and targets in favor of Liquid Data enhanced with
canonical messages. But trying to implement canonical messages can be rife
with problems such as causing infighting between departments and creating
rigid models that becom... (more)
XML-J: Would you care to comment on the state of XML technology in the
industry today?
Jaenicke: The official "state" of XML is that it's been accepted, but I don't
think it's well understood. Most IT managers and project leaders have XML on
some checklist somewhere, but few have yet incorporated IT in a strategic
way.
What's most interesting about the state of XML - past, present and future -
is the direction that it's moving. Technology (consider Java) usually comes
from the Ivory Tower, and it eventually pushes its way into the mainstream.
XML is completely different - it has... (more)
Now that the age of limitless optimism is over and it's trendy to be cynical,
I hear many Web services cynics remark that there's nothing new here. They're
just components. Been there, done that, and in fact we called it CORBA (or
COM). This leads to the inevitable questions about what truly is new and
different, and what is empty hype for yesterday's news.
In the Beginning...
Once upon a time, programmers analyzed their needs, wrote code, and solved
their problems. Life was good. Then scientists discovered the object and
promised code reuse and shorter development cycles. C++ was... (more)
XML databases are different from traditional databases, and they require a
new set of features and metrics for evaluating them. In my last column
(XML-J, Vol. 3, issue 2) I talked about native XML database management
systems (XDBMS), and I'd like to follow up with how they differ from
traditional databases and why this is significant.
When databases were first introduced to the industry eons ago, corporations
had piles upon piles of data waiting to be poured into some form of digital
storage and management. Not so with the introduction of XML - the biggest
bottlenecks today are ... (more)
The object is certainly not a new concept, but Web services are considered
new, difficult, and intimidating. Since a Web service can be thought of as a
glorified object with standard interfaces, why isn't this old hat? Many of
the difficulties of implementing services of any kind should be old hat, but
in fact we've been cheating all these years.
The original motivation behind objects - going back even before the first
object-oriented languages - was to enable reuse. By having self-contained and
autonomous chunks of functionality, these chunks can be called by anyone at
any time... (more)
Coco Jaenicke was, until recently, the XML evangelist and director of product marketing for eXcelon, the industry's first application development environment for building and deploying e-business applications. She is a member of XML-J's Editorial Advisory Board.
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