XML-Enabled Standards

The XML bandwagon is filling up, joined by many standards organizations. These entities are looking to standardize the way e-Business is conducted, using the common infrastructure they define and vendors provide.

The sad reality is that this bandwagon is overflowing there are more XML standards organizations than vendors and end users require. Fallout is bound to occur as one or two standards get traction and others do not. The few that appear to be most relevant in the world of XML and application integration include RosettaNet, XEDI, BizTalk, Extensible Financial Reporting Markup Language (XFRML), XML-Schema, XML Query, and XSLT.

RosettaNet is a consortium of product vendors and end users that defines a framework for data and process interchange with e-Business. Primarily organized for the high-tech industry, RosettaNet outlines standard message data using XML, as well as standardized process flows, to react to standard business events. We feel RosettaNet is so important that we've dedicated a chapter to it (see Chapter 14).

XEDI is a published specification describing how to map traditional EDI to XML and back again.

BizTalk is an industry consortium founded by Microsoft to define a standard XML grammar for XML-based messaging and metadata. Microsoft is providing a BizTalk server to support this standard.

XFRML is a standards push led by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to define an XML standard for reporting financial information over the Internet to other interested parties.

XML-Schema is a working group of the W3C that looks to describe a better mechanism to determine the structure of an XML document (see the description earlier in this chapter).

XML Query is another W3C working group looking to create a common set of operations and language syntax for accessing persisted (stored) XML data.

XSLT seeks to provide a standard XML document-transformation mechanism using a stylesheet as a common processing engine. XSLT is important to application integration because schema and information content often must be altered as information flows between applications. We will cover XSLT next.