Appendix B: XML Software

Appendix B

When XML was first developed and declared an official Recommendation by the W3C, everyone monitoring its progress, including the overall technical industry, realized that XML was going to be a major part of their future systems. Adoption of XML was slow, however, and people found its semantics hard to understand and digest.

This problem was not because XML is terribly complex, but more a case of "old habits die hard." Everyone was used to using HTML as their means of marking up content and sending it to others. XML, for true implementations, demanded more than just a structured document. Instances needed, though did not require, to be validated and servers or other receiving software had to be written to process the documents when transmitted. For this reason it was nearly two years before any successful applications emerged that truly decreased the amount of time it took to create XML solutions.

However, the time of emerging XML-based software tools, servers, and other applications is now here. Microsoft helped lead this charge and many other vendors created tools, components, and entire solutions based around the flexibility and syntax of XML. As you found out with this book, Microsoft's .NET initiative is not only a type of solution, but also a reflection of an entire shift to communicating and enabling via XML.

In this appendix we will introduce you to some of the tools you can tap for XML development. Because XML is not a platform-dependent language, we have tried to provide information on tools, such as those from Altova and TIBCO Extensibility, for all major platforms so you do not feel locked into the Microsoft Windows environment. Conversely as you saw throughout this book and especially in Chapter 16, Microsoft helped enable this cross-platform- and environment-independence by basing its .NET Framework on open standards.