Who This Book Is For

This book is meant for senior technical users, system architects, and technical managers who want to understand the impact XML can have on their organization and its systems. A shortage of skilled IT personnel, combined with tight IS budgets, means that every new project must be justified and a business case must be made. Large organizations are based around evolution, not revolution. Attempting to use a great technology to solve the wrong problem is a recipe for frustration and failure. This book shows how XML can be integrated with existing systems in a long-term, controlled fashion.

Readers of this book should already have a solid foundation in Internet technologies and protocols. There are many good books on the market that explain the workings of the HTTP protocol, SOAP, and TCP/IP. Although in-depth knowledge of these topics is not required, some familiarity with the plumbing of modern Internet applications is helpful.

Most organizations are forced to deal with heterogeneous systems, so this book gives examples for both Microsoft and open source platforms. XML provides an excellent mediator between systems that previously had no “common ground.” With an XML-based RPC protocol, such as SOAP, it is conceivable that a Microsoft ASP script could call an Enterprise Java Bean, which might then in turn read XML data from a legacy application running on a mainframe. This type of integration used to be costly and difficult to implement, but the adoption of XML by most software vendors means that interoperability is becoming easier all the time.