XML - Part I

I felt like writing something on XML and so decided to write some basics concepts i have learnt on XML. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is an interesting language and i enjoy working on XML- oriented languages. The only drawback with XML is you have to keep yourself updated with many related languages (XML Namespaces, XPath, XML Scehmas, etc.). Somtimes its fun learnig these languages too as they are necessary at times.

In Part-I i will try and cover few of the questions i had in mind when i started trying to learn or understand like, what is XML? How can we use XML? why go for XML?

What is XML?

As said before XML stand for eXtensible Markup Language. Well XML is something totally new to the world to the computing world. The definition on W3C says," Originally designed to meet the challenges of large scale electronic-publishing". XML as grown a long way since its intial year and it has been used in many different ways for different purposes. The current XML version we use is 1.0.

How we can use XML?

This is good question. XML can be used in multiple ways, and so it gives different views. Here are some of the ways XML is being used, XML can store data, but it is not a database. XML can serialize objects, but an XML document is not an object. Web pages can be written in XML, but XML is not HTML. Functional (and other) programming languages can be written in XML, but XML is not a programming language. Books are written in XML, but that doesn’t make XML desktop publishing software. XML is simply XML, that which can be eXtensible. XML by itself defines no boundaries, it gives us all the freedom to use it anyway we wish to.

Why go for XML?

This is another good question. For those of us who know the benefits of what Java language gives, XML too shares some of the benefits. Here are a few of the pros and cons of it.

Pros:
1)It is independent of architecture, platform, operating system, and language. Well u can say XML should work on any system that supports JAVA.
2)You can define your own tags, provided u follow the formatting rules.
3)Easily extensible.
4)It can be used for a variety of purposes as mentioned before.

Cons:
1)The one and only disadvantage of XML i found is lack of adequate processing applications. What i exactly mean by this is that you wrote an HTML Document, anyone, anywhere in the world could read that by opening the HTML file in any of the Web Browsers. But that is not the same with XML Documents as there are no XML browsers as of now. I guess IE version 5 + above provides displaying XML as of now, but the processing of selective XML data is still not a feature in any of the present day broswers.

In Part - II i guess i will cover the tools, API's available and describe them.

Well comments and suggestion are always welcome and feel free to contribute more on this.

All about Business Processes Management

Let us first get the definitions right.

Process Flow - A flow diagram showing the sequence of activities in a process.

Work Flow - Sequence of tasks. A workflow describes the order of a set of tasks performed by various agents to complete a given procedure within an organization.

Now all these jargon come into picture only in the Business Process Management Systems or Business Process Modelling (BPM). Before we venture into knowing more about BPM its always good to know the underlying concepts clearly. Here is a good one on Business Process and Web Services by Phil Wainewright. I hope by now you are familiar with the jargon and the concepts before we move on to BPM.

So now here is a good article i enjoyed reading on what is BPM The end in mind... by Jean-Jacques Dubray.

Microsoft enters Search Engine Activity

Today Microsoft has announced its entry into the search engine battle ground where Google enjoys its dominance. After Yahoo Inc broke its ties with Google and enterd the search engine now its the turn of the world's largest software vendor to enter this field. Well Microsoft has plans of having a desktop crawler. All the three american companies have entered a new-era of online commerce to take advantage of huge revenues spent on keeping your site listed on one of the Top Search engines.

How many of u have ever got this thought in your mind. Google doesn't have a decent face to its site, its just got a simple form which does a lot of work at the back-end. And Google makes much revenue out of just its Adsense program on its partner sites. All i am trying to say is u don't need a good Web interface to make successfull company. We have lots of things to learn from google.

For more information on how a Search Enigne works click here.

Welcome!

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      <blogger>
          <blog-details>
             <name> http://work-space.blogspot.com </name>
             <existence> 6-Nov-04 </existence>
             <category> Technology </category>
             <purpose> Share and Xplore Technology </purpose>
          </blog-details>
      </blogger>
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Hello world! i have created another blog-space for all the latest technology and the programming aspects which i have come across during my work. For those of you who have this doubt why one more blog-space?. All i can say, i prefer to have a different namespaces for each of my interests. I guess at somepoint of time i will open this blog for people who would like to contribute anything realted to technology or any programming concepts.

I have lot of things to write but time is a factor. Let's share the concepts which each one of us have and understand the technology better, so that we make use of the technology in better manner. Also feel free to correct me if at all i am wrong anywhere.