Preface

Someday most business applications will be able to read and write XML files. Until that happens, you are probably going to need techniques and utilities like those presented in this book. This book is for people who use business applications that don't currently support XML and for people who develop those applications and want to build XML support into them. It is designed to provide a tool kit of techniques and utilities that can help you perform common enterprise application integration ( EAI ), business-to-business ( B2B ), or electronic data interchange ( EDI ) data conversion operations using XML.

Nothing in this book is rocket science. Any good programmer with experience in the relevant technologies could develop any of these techniques and utilities. The point of this book is that I've done it so that you don't have to. As is often said, good programmers develop good programs. Better programmers steal what they can and modify it. Steal this code.

If you are a user of a business application and already have or can afford to procure a capable EAI or EDI software package, you probably don't need this book. However, if you have only some simple needs that don't justify the purchase of such a package, or if for some other reason you don't want to or can't afford to spend thousands of dollars to purchase one, then this book is for you. And if you are interested in an open , nonproprietary, standards-based, and portable approach to data conversion, then this book is for you, too.