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November 1, 1999

XML: The Language Of Integration
The meta-language standard provides an easy and available way to identify and share data

By Alan Radding

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pplication developers are suddenly finding a better way to achieve data integration. Instead of hammering out specialized data exchange formats, writing proprietary parsers to pull data out of messages, and maintaining custom data connectors for multiple applications and data sources, they are turning to XML, the Extensible Markup Language. Unlike electronic data interchange, a cumbersome, overhead-laden approach to data exchange, XML is lightweight, easy, and increasingly available.

XML is popping up everywhere. For example, Microsoft's latest Windows DNA 2000 product-strategy announcement specifies XML throughout the product line. However, Microsoft is one of many vendors turning to XML. "It's nice to get the approval of the industry's 800-pound gorilla, but XML wasn't waiting for Microsoft," says Mark Driver, research director with the Gartner Group's E-Business Technology service. Many software vendors are rushing to support XML.

XML is not a product or a platform. Neither is it the second coming of Java, nor a latter-day SQL. It is an enabling technology, like IP itself, Driver says. XML is a meta-language standard for specifying a document-markup language based on plain-text tags. It's a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language. HTML, another subset of SGML, is a similar tag-based cousin of XML, but where HTML tags tell the browser how to display various elements on a Web page, XML tags specify what those elements are.

For example, an XML tag will identify a customer name as a name, and another will identify the customer's address as an address. One tag will identify a number as a product number and another as a ZIP code. Entire sets of XML tags are being defined for specialized situations and vertical industries.

As such, XML provides a flexible way to create common data formats and share both the format and the data. The great power of XML lies in its extensibility and its ability to separate the presentation of the data from the data itself. As a result, it lets developers create self-defining text tags to identify a piece of data and to lift data, based on specific tags, out of Web pages for use in other applications. For example, using XML, a company can identify the data elements in a customer-processing application, such as name, address, and account representative, based on their meanings. A different application can subsequently identify that data and use it appropriately.

Application developers are only beginning to see how much they can do with XML and where they can apply it. "We've just gotten our feet wet with XML," says Joseph Ruffolo, software architect for NuSkin Enterprises Inc. in Provo, Utah. The company built a Forté component that uses XML to send and receive SAP information.

Without XML, the developers would have had to create a text stream and an infrastructure to handle the text stream. With XML, NuSkin developers define the format once, then can use it over. The XML infrastructure, the parsers, everything needed to finish the job, are included. Then, using Forté, they were able to add the logic that processes the SAP data for the given application.

Photo by Alan Blaustein C-bridge Internet Solutions Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., is using XML to integrate the supply chain for a major petroleum company through a business portal. The company operates a national chain of gas station/convenience stores. Using XML through the portal, the company can track orders and eliminate rekeying orders to its suppliers, says Ronald Bodkin, C-bridge's chief technology officer.

"If we couldn't use XML, we'd have to come up with our own data format or use EDI, if an appropriate EDI format existed," Bodkin says. But EDI is prohibitively expensive, particularly for small suppliers, and custom formats are costly to create, deploy, and maintain. XML, on the other hand, "is portable and self-describing," he says.

Bob Lamoureux Photo by Stephen Sherman Data integration certainly appears to be the first big XML application, but many analysts and developers say the industry has barely begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with XML. "XML has only just reached the point where it is starting to ramp up big," says Frank Gillett, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. By providing a mechanism for expressing data in a structured way, regardless of the inherent native incompatibilities of the platforms and systems involved, XML opens up a wealth of opportunities for developers in publishing, E-business, application integration, customer service, supply-chain management, and more.

Already, XML is on the fast track to replace the proprietary Financial Information Exchange protocol in the financial industry. The FIX protocol, a public-domain specification owned and maintained by FIX Protocol Ltd., is a messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions.

"We have found that 100% of the FIX protocol can be transferred to XML," says Bob Lamoureux, senior VP of FIX protocol for Bridge Information Systems Inc., a New York provider of market data to the financial-services industry. Bridge has been working with XML for just six months.

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