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.

Sarvega, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance XML networking solutions, today announced that Simon Davidson has joined the company as the vice president of business development. Davidson is joining the company as the global demand for the company's industry-leading portfolio of XML acceleration, security and routing products is increasing.

Flex is a Web UI Builder (or RIA, Rich Internet Application builder) from Macromedia that runs as a presentation server in several Java servers, including Tomcat 4 and 5, Macromedia’s JRun 4, IBM WebSphere and BEA’s WebLogic Server, among others. Because it is a presentation server, one would expect Flex to be in the thin-client mold of, say, ASP, JSP, PHP or the new Java Server Faces (JSF). But Flex is one of the new breed of RIAs that is in a race to improve and polish the Web interface.

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.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Even if new buildings are connected to Internet, they usually don't communicate between themselves. And when it comes to electricity, these buildings are selfish and consume what they want without any coordination.

Stylus Studio™, the world's leading XML IDE was featured today in a technical session and breakfast chaired by XML expert Jonathan Robie. The session discussed SQL/XML, XQJ, XQuery, and data integration scenarios for XML queries. Stylus Studio was used to demonstrate how these technologies work using DataDirect XQuery™ and Connect for SQL/XML™ to perform XML queries on relational sources.

Birdstep Technology (OSE: BIRD) today announced the release and availability of the Birdstep RDM Embedded version 7.1 database management solution (Birdstep RDM Embedded Website) with XML. Birdstep RDM Embedded, with XML, provides a high performance embeddable database platform using an industry standard format that simplifies system interoperability and integration.

DataDirect Technologies, a provider of components for connecting software to data, says Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) has selected its DataDirect Connect for JDBC suite of drivers for the Sun Java Studio Creator offering and the Sun Java System Application Server. DataDirect says its JDBC components “will enhance Sun’s data connectivity capabilities in both development and deployment environments. The inclusion of DataDirect Connect for JDBC in the Sun Java Enterprise System provides additional functionality, performance and database independence while simplifying and accelerating application design and development for Java developers.”

Optio(r) Software (OTCBB:OPTO) today announced the general availability of the Optio XML Solution Kit, a comprehensive set of output management solutions that provide advanced server, authoring and preprocessing capabilities to meet companies' growing demand for XML-enabled communications across their global supply chains.

Sun Microsystems has announced the release of the open source JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) Project on Javadesktop.org. JDNC includes the lightweight JDNC Markup Language, and aims to "simplify the development of rich networked desktop applications by means of a set of high-level user interface components with built-in networking and data-binding support."

Stylus Studio™, the industry-leading innovator of tools for XML development and productivity, shipped Release 5.3 of its award-winning XML Integrated Development Environment (XML IDE) today. Stylus Studio Release 5.3, adds a flexible XML differencing utility, significant XML Mapping enhancements, and many usability and performance improvements, solidifying its reputation as the most comprehensive XML IDE on the market.

In a recent Gartner research report titled "PolarLake Uses Fast XML Processing to Integrate Applications", the analyst firm advises organizations to "Consider PolarLake for departmental or business unit integration projects requiring high-speed transformation and routing of complex messages". PolarLake™ is a leader in standards-based incremental integration and provides a complete suite of products (PolarLake Integration Suite) for implementing XML and Web Services-based solutions, including those based on the Enterprise Service Bus architecture. Performance and scalability are at the heart of PolarLake's offering with it's Dynamic XML Runtime™, a Java engine capable of high-speed transformation, routing, splitting and combining of complex documents based on XML. "In a real-world project, PolarLake processes 120 complex documents per second on a single machine," said Massimo Pezzini, Gartner Analyst.

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.

"We are the Borg" - this is one of the biggest promises of the 'net, and proliferation of computers. A shared knowledge set that you can put to work on issues that arise. That knowledge set is tough to mine today, but people are starting to succeed, and tools are starting to evolve as well. With bigger systems, networked systems and yes, even grid-based systems, the infrastructure is coming around - now it's time for applications and solutions vendors to pick up the pace. 7-Eleven is doing this with their systems, and there was a good case study on their approach in Information Week.

During the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 June Trimester Meeting held in Chicago, June 6-11, 2004, it was announced that the ballot of X12.7 was ratified by ninety-seven percent of the membership, making Context Inspired Component Architecture (CICA) and XML Syntax Representation the newest member of the ASC X12 standard.

Stylus Studio™, the industry-leading innovator of tools for XML development and productivity, shipped Release 5.3 of its award-winning XML Integrated Development Environment (IDE) today. Stylus Studio Release 5.3, adds a flexible XML differencing utility, significant XML Mapping enhancements, and many usability and performance improvements, solidifying its reputation as the most comprehensive XML IDE on the market.

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

I may have not stressed enough one of the most important features enabled by the XPathNavigatorReader: in-memory (without reparsing) XML Schema validation of arbitrary sources exposed as XPathNavigator.

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.