If you follow web services, then you may have heard of REST. REST is an architectural style that can be used to guide the construction of web services. Recently, there have been attempts to create such services that have met with mixed success. This article outlines a series of steps you can follow in creating your protocol--guidance that will help you get all the benefits that REST has to offer, while avoiding common pitfalls.

Data tiers hold the promise of vastly simplifying application maintenance and reducing the number of redundant data stores in your organization.

Blast Radius is helping companies make better use of their corporate data by using the company's open source XML content management and creation tools. Various businesses are employing the technology so they can work with and utilize mixed data types.

Last month we looked at XSLT's role in the reference implementation for Schematron, a schema language that lets you express many constraints that can't be expressed in RELAX NG (RNG) or the W3C Schema language (XSD). Instead of defining an entire schema, Schematron rules usually supplement the structural and typing rules described using one of the other two languages—or perhaps even written as a DTD—so that a Schematron rule set typically accompanies a schema written in one of the other languages.

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2004--The rapid adoption of XML and Web Services has a significant downside. As network traffic based on XML increases, IT data center administrators and developers are quickly realizing that the operational inefficiencies of XML are bogging down their general-purpose hardware and software, according to ZapThink's latest report, "High Performance and Appliance Approaches for XML."

Most Web masters, at one time or another, are asked to create an online survey for their company's web site. This isn't a terribly difficult task with just plain HTML and traditional ASP, but suppose you'd like to be able to create a survey quickly -- I mean really quickly -- and you don't want to be stuck with the same look and feel you used last time. Rather, you want to create a survey with completely new questions and a fresh new look and feel. Well, that might be a bit time consuming, depending on how much of your original code you're able to reuse.

XmlSS.NET is a managed spreadsheet component based almost entirely on XMLSS, the XML Schema defined by Microsoft to govern the Excel workbook document instance. What follows in this article is a very brief introduction to XMLSS for those of you who are not already familiar with the subject, followed by a very quick rundown of the purpose, design, implementation, and use of the XmlSS.NET spreadsheet component.

Again in my articles, I would like to return to problems of teamwork among Web designers and programmers. On the one hand, the problem looks as though it does not exist at all. But on another—in the development of complex and difficult sites, with huge files, and frequently varying data—this question of correct co-operation of Web designers and programmers is a big and important question! Designers usually are not technical geeks. And they also do not want to learn, for example, JSP to help the programmers. And they are right, because they need to do their own jobs well. So, what happens when programmers make a big change to the business logic of a project? They need to inform the designers, who will have to work with complex code, that consists of numerous lines of HTML, JSP, JavaScript, and other code in one place. It could be painful.

One of the excellent features of the next release of SQL Server, known as SQL Server 2005, is its deep XML integration with the SQL Server database engine. This integration goes well beyond the simple relational-to-XML mapping layer that SQL Server 2000 provided. SQL Server 2005 will feature a native XML data type that will allow you to store native XML data in SQL Server itself.

Populate Table Control Dynamically from DataReader According to a Format Given in an XML File.

It is often necessary to make your C++ objects serializable to/from XML. It is simple to do so in Java or C#, for example, by using reflection, but not always in C++. It would be interesting to introduce some brief but portable way to describe objects' serializable properties. The prototype presented allows defining XML serializable objects using macros in an MSVC++ 7 unmanaged code attributes-like manner because each serializable object/property needs to be described only once in the class definition, for example:

A simple wrapper class using DOM (Document Object Model) to manipulate XML files.

Last December at XML 2003, I met with Jonathan Robie, one of my XML heroes. You’ll find his name on such core XML specifications as DOM, XML Schema, and XQuery. Jonathan is both a co-inventor of XQuery and, as XML program manager at DataDirect, a leading implementer of that standard. So he gets to combine theory with practice — nice work, if you can get it.

This week's XML Deviant is a tale of two specifications. One, a scruffy ragtag affair that barely seems to do the job. The other, a well-heeled, aristocratic sort of document, groomed for longevity. You know what's coming next, of course. The tramp of which I speak, the unlikely RSS, goes from strength to strength. But the latest offspring in the noble line of XML, version 1.1, is doomed.

World's Largest Independent XML Trade Conference Slated for Nov. 15-19 in Washington, D.C.; Event Sponsors Include Adobe, Arbortext, DataDirect, Sun Microsoft, SchemaSoft, and TRADOS. The will be numerous sponsors and exhibitors for XML Conference and Exposition 2004, being held Nov. 15-19 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Organizations sponsoring this year's event include industry leaders Adobe Systems, Arbortext, DataDirect Technologies, Sun Microsystems, SchemaSoft and TRADOS.

The five weeks up to and including the middle of September were interesting (to say the least) here in sunny Florida. Depending on how you count, we had somewhere between three and five named tropical storms and hurricanes pummel our coastline and interior. We knew in advance the storms were coming, of course. We just didn't know when or exactly where.

Dare Obasanjo describes how to use the Schematron XML validation language to enforce constraints on XML documents beyond the capabilities of the W3C XML Schema.

Newspapers are conservative when it comes to embracing new technology, says David Cole, a consultant who helps publishers devise better publishing workflows and systems selections. "Historically, major newspapers have been mired in proprietary technologies, and they turn over their systems only once every 10 to 15 years," he says. Perhaps it's fitting, then, that one of the few pioneers willing to bet on new XML-based technologies is the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, a paper that has served the nation's gambling capitol since 1950. Greenspun Media Group, which publishes the Sun as well six magazines and affiliated Web sites, is breaking with specialized newspaper publishing systems to move into multichannel publishing and reuse with XML-tagged content.

For 30 years, a few strident voices have warned us that the world is running out of oil. With low energy prices, it used to be easy for some to dismiss them as tree-hugging cranks, but now with oil costing more than $40 per barrel and rising, maybe their dire predictions are finally coming true. Similarly, for 15 years we've been hearing that paper as a medium of financial transactions would be replaced by electronic media. That promise — or threat, depending on where your interests lie — has also been laughingly dismissed by the content management community as a pointy-headed fantasy. So far the naysayers have been right. Despite the hype, e-forms have never become a major factor in critical business processes. Sure, the Web is great for ordering books and music, but for getting a mortgage, filing an insurance claim or submitting a tax return, paper is still more secure, more legally enforceable and more user-friendly. I believe that a steep decline is finally in sight for high-volume paper-based transactions. We still won't have paperless offices or an upsurge in e-forms software, but in five years, much of the business handled today by paper forms scanning and data capture will have moved to XML data transmitted over the Web.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides maps for assembling topics into deliverables. By specializing the map elements, you can define a formal information architecture for your deliverables. This architecture provides guidance to authors on how to organize topics and lets processes recognize your organizing principles, resulting in a consistent, clear experience for your users.