| In the technology world, change is the only constant. With change has come the possibility of doing business in better, faster, more effective, and cheaper ways. First, the Internet revolutionized the way the world communicated. It brought forward a whole new way in which business information and transaction was done. The enterprises with services to offer had a whole new way to publish information. The purchasing companies benefited in terms of the amount of information they had at their disposal, thereby helping them make prudent decisions. The beauty of the whole thing was that it no longer mattered what platforms and operating systems the enterprises used. The TCP/IP + HTTP + HTML combination ensured that any machine with the TCP/IP protocol stack and a browser could connect to and access any site on the Internet. Although the TCP/IP+HTTP combination helped accomplish machine independence as far as publishing and reading Web pages was concerned, the platform-dependency of the applications that actually ran on the Web server remained a problem. For example, an application that was developed for a Windows NT Web server could not be used on a Unix-based Web server. You had to port the application by recompiling the application on the required operating system/hardware. This problem was solved by the development of the Java programming language. Java made it possible to write a program once and run it on any operating system or hardware. Even as Java made write-once/run anywhere applications possible, HTML ensured that any Web browser could read data and display it to the user in a consistent manner. It was soon apparent that the real power of the Internet would be realized only when heterogeneous machines connected to the Internet could exchange data and perform business transactions. A mechanism was required by which applications residing on different machines could exchange data with each other in a consistent way. XML was developed to meet this requirement. XML provided a text-based way in which to define your own information structure, and through the use of DTDs and schemas, you could ensure that all applications that exchange an XML document have a common understanding of the data contained in the XML document. So, while Java provided portability of code, XML enabled the portability of data. It was inevitable that the wonderful people involved in the development of Java would come out with APIs that would enable application developers to develop XML-based applications. These APIs absolve developers from having to understand the nuances and eccentricities of the XML language itself. Thus, as a developer, you can concentrate completely on business logic, rather than on the XML syntax. At the time of this writing, the released APIs were geared to enable developers to create and deploy a special type of XML-enabled application called Web services. This book teaches you how to use the Java APIs for XML (JAX). The book is structured in such a way that you can either read it from cover to cover, or only a specific section. Each API is explained using simple and easy-to-follow examples. | 
Print 
E-Mail 
Add Note 
Add Bookmark
