Transmitting Content

Before the Internet, physical connectivity was the major road block to system integration. Each company operated as an island, with a local area network (LAN) connecting computers at a single physical location, and perhaps (but not necessarily) a wide area network (WAN) connecting multiple locations together. High telecommunications costs made this type of networking expensive and the cost of dedicated connections between different companies prohibitive. Then the rapid growth of the Internet drove connectivity costs down to the point where now every business can have an affordable network connection to every other business, at will.

After the network connectivity problem was solved, data formats become the primary issue. With rapid connectivity also came the need to protect sensitive corporate data from unauthorized users. Firewalls and proxy servers proliferated to keep hostile Internet users away from critical systems. Even within a single organization, mixed vendors and incompatible technologies made transporting data between systems impractical.

New standards such as XML-RPC and SOAP have greatly simplified the task of connecting otherwise-incompatible systems. The capability of XML to be encoded as UTF-8 (of which ASCII is a subset) means that almost every computer system developed in the past 40 years is capable of reading and writing messages sent in XML format. That coupled with the simple syntax of XML means that even the oldest legacy systems can support XML parsing and more sophisticated protocols that are built on XML, such as SOAP.