December 20/27, 1999

Printer ready

1999 Product Of The Year
Extensible Markup Language

By Gregory Smith

Products Of The Year:

Broadvision One-To-One CacheFlow's Web-Caching System Red Hat Linux 6.1 Novell Directory Services B Oracle8i Network-Based Procurement Services i2 Technologies' Rhythm Siebel 99 Four-Way Enterprise Servers Extensible Markup Language Hardware Renaissance Most Important Products of the '90s

Send Us Your Feedback

t's surprising how often very simple ideas dramatically change the way information technology works. Case in point: the Extensible Markup Language. The mechanics of XML couldn't be simpler: Use arbitrary tags to delineate structured data, particularly database records. XML uses the tags provided by the Standard Generalized Markup Language.

Originally a mechanism to deliver data to Web browsers, the software industry has embraced XML as the de facto standard for exchanging data among nearly all data-driven systems. Relatively few Web applications to this point stream raw XML to browsers--not surprising, given how long it's taking users to upgrade to XML-ready browsers. But nearly all enterprise systems released in 1999--from database platforms to groupware--had an XML connector.

XML may prove to be the key enabling technology that lets users integrate applications throughout the enterprise. This may sharply boost demand for enterprise-application integration suites, as practically any system can coordinate its work through XML. But it could also hurt that class of applications, as the underlying systems are increasingly capable of exchanging data without the benefit of another layer of software.

As of 1999, XML joins the ranks of the key enabling open standards, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

Read about the next product

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---