Chapter 4: XML


Overview

We've described the general characteristics of SOA and now approach the practical details. At the core of SOA is Extensible Markup Language (XML), a set of widely accepted rules for organizing data in a text format. In particular, each message exchanged with a Web service is in a format that conforms to those rules.

XML is described at the Web site of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standard's sponsoring organization. To give you a sense of what XML provides, we occasionally quote from the W3C recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition), which is available at http://www.w3.org/TR.

We omit many complexities that are described in the specification, as well as on the Web and in textbooks. A user interface will stand between you and those documents anyway, so your development work may not require you to access XML documents a lot.

But don't be fooled. The user interface lets you work quickly and reduces the tedium of many tasks, but it doesn't separate you completely from the underlying technology. If you understand SOA at the level of the XML-based files, you can

  • respond to error conditions with greater skill

  • understand the implications of user-interface settings that pertain to XML

  • review or even change the XML files directly ("Oh, that's what's happening!")

  • avoid dependence on tools provided by a particular vendor

Excellence often requires you to know details that are below the surface, and in any case, broccoli is good for you.




SOA for the Business Developer. Concepts, BPEL, and SCA
SOA for the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA (Business Developers series)
ISBN: 1583470654
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 157
Authors: Ben Margolis

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