XML Based Applications

XML is one of the key technologies that are driving Enterprise development today. XML promises a standard data format that can be shared easily across applications and different organizations that need to share data.

XML is a key technology in distributed applications. But unlike other over-hyped technologies, XML has been rapidly accepted because it solves very specific technical problems by using a standard protocol/data representation. The simple act of agreeing to a common data format for data is making data exchange drastically easier than it ever was before.

Even in its simplest form XML as a standard has lots of potential as a data representation and messaging mechanism. Data representation typically involves translating the data from a native format into XML, and then back into the same format or even a completely different one on the other end of a connection.

Axiom consultants have the experience & the technological expertise in the XML domain. We have experience in designing and developing applications that require strong knowledge of XML, Schema, DTD & XSL. Following are some of the examples that drive the acceptance of XML:

XML as a standard data exchange format: This is particularly useful in Web applications where XML can provide a standard, agreed upon format to transfer data over the Internet. In this respect XML is similar to a data format such as Comma Delimited or SDF file in the past. However, as a data representation format XML is also much more powerful & flexible than these old formats. Most other text formats have been hampered by their limited ability to transport complex data like memo fields or binary data. XML is very flexible in what kind data it can carry because of its tag based language definition where every XML data element is marked with a start and end tag.

A good example may be a VB application publishing some of its data via XML and another application, possibly a Java Servlets, picking up that XML data and using it internally.

Support for multiple sub-documents: Another huge advantage of XML as a data representation mechanism is that XML can combine multiple pieces of data into a single document. The markup language has support for stacked and hierarchical data representation. XML documents can combine several separate entities (be it tables, objects, messages or metadata) into a single XML document. For example, you can send the actual data of say a table, as well as a message header that describes the data or maybe contains any error conditions that might have occurred in obtaining that data. You could also combine multiple tables (as an example) into a single document. Or a table and an object both parsed into XML.