This week is my last as editor of XML.com. Since September 1999 I have had the great honor and pleasure of steering the site through some of the most exciting times in XML's development.

Google has always been a marvel to those of us whose living revolves around high technology. When the beta emerged, we quickly passed our colleagues the tip about this new search engine with the mercifully simple front end and the uncanny ability to return the most relevant results for most searches. As time went on, and Google became an indispensable tool in our trade, we began to clue in our less-technical acquaintances. Google is a technology even our grandmothers can use. Like an oracle, you express what you seek in simple terms, never minding the underlying magic; unlike an oracle, however, you don’t have to bring an offering before you’re seen, and the answers are generally informative and not couched in puzzles.

This tutorial offers an insight into the new Call Control XML (CCXML) language. This language enhances the telephony industry by allowing development of call control functionality, irrespective of the base proprietary telephony system.

In this installment, David discusses his practical experiences developing interrelated XML data formats for the EVM2003 Free Software project to develop voting machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. Some design principles of format subsetting emerge. In addition, David looks at how an application-specific meaning for XML document equivalence can be programmed, and why canonicalization is insufficient.

This article uses XML and HttpWebRequest to pull and format weather information from The Weather Channel XML feed.

Crediting one person for the work of a group is always fraught with peril. But in the case of the XForms specification, Micah Dubinko's name comes to the fore.

In the first article of the series, I explained the ways of presenting relational data in XML format using the FOR XML clause of the T-SQL SELECT statement. Now it is time to look into the reverse process of inserting XML formatted data into SQL databases using OpenXML function.

Genx is an easy-to-use C library for generating well-formed XML output. In addition to being well-formed, Genx writes all output in canoncial form. It was created by Tim Bray with help from members of the xml-dev mail list. Work on Genx was announced on xml-dev on 19 January 2004. Some of the benefits of Genx include size, efficiency, speed, and the integrity of its output. Genx is well documented; it's fairly easy to figure out what's going on just by looking at the well-commented source code.

Libraries of text have always been the framework for knowledge and learning in human societies. Important developments throughout history have fueled great leaps forward in civilization. Clay tablets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians in Ur (in modern-day Iraq), and papyrus scrolls in Thebes in New Kingdom Egypt took the gathering of texts to the greatest extent possible given the fragile material used for books in the period. Library establishment mixed thoroughly with politics in Egyptian Alexandria (under heavy Greek influence) and the great library of parchment was born. But a key contribution came from Rome, not so much in content, nor in format.

From XML's inception circa 1996 through the initial hype blitz up to the present day, the term XML has been ubiquitous. What does it all mean, and what do you really need to know?

If you've been following along with Part I and Part II of XML Basics, you're ready for Part III, where you put the pieces together and experiment with hands-on with XML.

Next week's issue of InfoWorld includes an article on the new XML capabilities of Office 11. While researching the story, I interviewed the architect of XML in Office 11, Microsoft's Jean Paoli, one of the primary co-creators of XML. Here are some of his remarks.

XML has become the common format for passing data between components residing on different platforms. With the move to XML-based services, developers often find themselves converting various data structures to and from XML. Arguably, the most prevalent form of persisting data is in relational databases. How does one go about converting relational data structures into XML? In this article, we'll do just that and build a utility to expose relational data as XML documents.

Berkeley DB XML is a database library built on the venerable Berkeley DB engine. Sleepycat engineers erected a layer atop Berkeley DB, extending that engine and creating a new one that provides XML document storage, management, and querying.

Microsoft on Thursday announced it has released documentation that allows corporate and third-party developers to take full advantage of the XML-based schemas, called DatadiagramML, in its Office Visio diagramming tool.

Microsoft has released documentation that allows corporate and third-party developers to take full advantage of the XML-based schemas, called DatadiagramML, in its Office Visio diagramming tool.

As SQL and XML capabilities converge in the leading relational engines, you might conclude that there's no future for dedicated XML databases. A year ago, in his keynote at the InfoWorld CTO Forum, BEA Chief Architect Adam Bosworth explained why they're still relevant, and what their new mission will be. Coarse-grained XML messages are the wefts of the service-oriented fabric we're now weaving. We're going to be pumping a lot of those messages, and the pumps won't merely route messages. They'll also scan SOAP headers, correlate messages, enforce security policies, and respond to XPath-style queries -- all this in a real-time environment that can't tolerate the slightest delay.

Expected to ship by mid-2005, Yukon represents a major step forward for Microsoft in the XML arena. Striving to match the native XML storage capabilities in IBM’s, Oracle’s, and Sybase’s relational databases, Yukon will finally store XML data in a structured fashion, along with supporting the shredded and unstructured storage methods already available in Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

If you could do one thing to improve integration and automate processes with customers and business partners, it would be to implement XML, which has become the standard for exchanging information between disparate systems because it is easily transformed into any format. With very little effort, the same file can be sent to several different customers with their own specific needs. XML eases the development effort for the transmitting company and gives recipients a safety net for altering the way they use the data without having to alter how they receive it.

The next iteration of the SQL standard was supposed to arrive in 2003. But SQL standardization has always been a glacially slow process, so nobody should be surprised that SQL:2003 — now known as SQL:200n — isn’t ready yet. Even so, 2003 was a year in which XML-oriented data management, one of the areas addressed by the forthcoming standard, showed up on more and more developers’ radar screens.