Introduction

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The eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, is a simple technology that has taken the computer world by storm. Even before XML was formally adopted, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called XML a "breakthrough technology" because he saw the value of defining data transactions in an open, platform-independent way. Since then, many standards of data interchange have been built on top of XML, each with a particular purpose and all using XML's simple syntax.

BizTalk and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are XML-based, open initiatives designed to facilitate electronic commerce between systems on the Web. Both BizTalk and SOAP use XML as their data exchange syntax, because XML enables you to specify data in a very precise way.

I've wanted to write an XML book for some time. My book, The SGML Implementation Guide (Springer Verlag, 1995), was a real-world hands-on guide to implementers of SGML in the mid-1990s. When XML came along, I wanted to update my first book to make it XML-compatible. This was difficult, however. Because of its simplicity, flexibility, and much smaller size, XML can do so much more than SGML. Any book that I wrote would have to be XML-specific.

I have a job that keeps me pretty busy, so I never got around to writing that XML book. Over the next year or so, there were plenty of XML books published that covered various topics, and the XML bookshelf at the local book superstore was getting pretty crowded. I didn't want my XML book to get lost on that shelf.

Then came a couple of great XML applications—BizTalk and SOAP—and I figured it was time to write my first XML book.

There are similarities between BizTalk and SOAP, but there are also differences. In this book, I will attempt to explain these differences and give examples of each.



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

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