XML

Extensible Markup Language, a metalanguage that allows users to define their own customized markup languages, esp. in order to display documents on the World Wide Web It is an advanced language developed by w3C.

What is XML?
XML is a standard, simple, self-describing way of encoding both text and data so that content can be processed with relatively little human intervention and exchanged across diverse hardware, operating systems, and applications. In brief, XML offers a widely adopted standard way of representing text and data in a format that can be processed without much human or machine intelligence. Information formatted in XML can be exchanged across platforms, languages, and applications, and can be used with a wide range of development tools and utilities. XML is similar enough to HTML in its actual format (both are closely related to the SGML markup definition language that has been an ISO standard since 1986) so that those familiar with HTML can fairly easily pick up basic XML knowledge. But there are two fundamental differences:

Separation of form and content -- HTML mostly consists of tags defining the appearance of text; in XML the tags generally define the structure and content of the data, with actual appearance specified by a specific application or an associated style sheet. XML is extensible -- tags can be defined by individuals or organizations for some specific application, whereas the HTML standard tag set is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Simplicity Information coded in XML is easy to read and understand, plus it can be processed easily by computers. Openness XML is a W3C standard, endorsed by software industry market leaders. Extensibility There is no fixed set of tags. New tags can be created as they are needed. Self-description In traditional databases, data records require schemas set up by the database administrator. XML documents can be stored without such definitions, because they contain meta data in the form of tags and attributes. XML provides a basis for author identification and versioning at the element level. Any XML tag can possess an unlimited number of attributes such as author or version.

Contains machine-readable context information Tags, attributes and element structure provide context information that can be used to interpret the meaning of content, opening up new possibilities for highly efficient search engines, intelligent data mining, agents, etc. This is a major advantage over HTML or plain text, where context information is difficult or impossible to evaluate. Separates content from presentation XML tags describe meaning not presentation. The motto of HTML is: "I know how it looks", whereas the motto of XML is: "I know what it means, and you tell me how it should look." The look and feel of an XML document can be controlled by XSL style sheets, allowing the look of a document (or of a complete Web site) to be changed without touching the content of the document. Multiple views or presentations of the same content are easily rendered. Supports multilingual documents internationalization of applications. and Unicode This is important for the

Facilitates the comparison and aggregation of data The tree structure of XML documents allows documents to be compared and aggregated efficiently element by element. Can embed multiple data types XML documents can contain any possible data type from multimedia data (image, sound, video) to active components (Java applets, ActiveX). Can embed existing data Mapping existing data structures like file systems or relational databases to XML is simple. XML supports multiple data formats and can cover all existing data structures and Provides a 'one-server view' for distributed data XML documents can consist of nested elements that are distributed over multiple remote servers. XML is currently the most sophisticated format for distributed data - the World Wide Web can be seen as one huge XML database. Rapid adoption by industry Software AG, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Netscape, DataChannel, SAP and many others have already announced support for XML. Microsoft will use XML as the exchange format for its Office product line, while both Microsoft's and Netscape's Web browsers support XML. SAP has announced support of XML through the SAP Business Connector with R/3. Software AG supports XML in its Natural product line and provides Tamino, a native XML database.

The enterprise database infrastructure today consists largely of high-end transaction processing systems such as Adabas and IMS on one hand and RDBMS-based information systems on the other.

Over the last five years, however, there has been an explosion of demand for access to these enterprise databases over the internet, and also to use them to support electronic business operations. These include transactions between systems within an enterprise ("enterprise integration"), between businesses in a supply chain ("B2B e-commerce") and directly to customers ("B2C e-commerce"). The initial reaction of most companies was to integrate these diverse operations by building or buying software such as "application servers" that employed protocols such as DCOM or CORBA to perform such integration. More recently, XML offers the option of performing the necessary integration by exchanging standardized data. Why is this, and what about XML has changed the situation? The SQL standard defines a vendor-neutral way of finding and extracting data from an RDBMS, so it is quite possible to write middleware applications that extract data from one database and put it in another. Nevertheless, these applications must be relatively complex and pay careful attention to the database schemas on each side in order to work properly. XML, on the other hand, is simply a standardized "meta-format" that can represent any kind of data, and for which precise schema definitions are optional. Thus, XML has become widely used to integrate enterprises, supply chains, and Web applications because it is:

Standardized - Many products from many vendors are available that implement something close to the World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation on XML. Simple - the technology is easy to learn and implement, with many tutorials and "how to" books available. Self-describing - straightforward data exchange applications can be written without reference to detailed format descriptions or schemas.

So, XML is redefining today's database infrastructure by serving as the "glue" that binds diverse enterprise systems to each other and to the internet.