xml-dev - Re: Regulating the XML Marketplace

["Gerard Berthet" <gberthet@netcom.com>]

Easy it is, indeed! But the real business benefits will be in the
low life-cycle cost for app vendors to interoperate with other
third-party apps. Clearly, there is tremendous information
to be shared across heterogeneous apps. For example, how many apps have
the same person name in their database? the same equipment
identifier (IP address) in their database?

First, because so many apps duplicate the same information, add developers
would benefit tremendously from extracting the data from a single
recognized data provider (ERP app and SNMP platform respectively,
in the examples above). That done, the app vendor can then focus on adding
real value to its app.

XML makes this data exchange possible, but as was pointed out, this is
not revolutionary.

The biggest value XML brings is that, in the past, an app vendor was very
reluctant to support other vendor-proprietary APIs to support such data
exchange, not because it was not feasible, but because it was
cost-prohibitive.
Imagine an application having to interoperate with one or more app, each app
having a couple of releases in the market, each release on several UNIX
flavors & versions and MS platforms. A great deal of development resources
had to be allocated just to maintain the status-quo, constantly catching up
with the latest release. This model was fundamentally broken.

With XML, interoperability
is simpler for both data producers and consumers, and needs only to be
implemented
once for all apps and platforms, clearly relieving valuable
development resources to add real value to the app and eventually to the
end-user,
killer app or not.

That is, in my opinion, how XML will gain ground.
Regards,
Gerard



-----Original Message-----
From: Shekhar Kshirsagar <skshirsa@nortelnetworks.com>
To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Date: Friday, January 08, 1999 8:52 AM
Subject: RE: Regulating the XML Marketplace


>I agree with Matt.
>I think way of exchanging structure information on Web in an interoperable
>way -
>XML or something else, is the need of today and tomorrow.
>
>The earlier standards for data exchange didn't become popular may be
>because enough
>initiative was not there to support those standards in the Web
environments.
>XML is not great but most importantantly it's simple and so widespread
>support of XML
>seems to be feasible in near future.
>
>Eventually XSL will allow easy & flexible display of of XML data in the
>browsers.
>I see lot of opportunity for XML based applications once the Web browsers
>have a
>stabilized support for XML/XSL/DOM.
>
>May not be just XML, but XML + XSL + DOM support within popular browsers is
>definitely exciting and opens lot of opportunities for killer apps.
>
>Shekhar Kshirsagar
>Nortel Networks.
>
>At 05:04 PM 1/8/99 +0100, Matthew Sergeant (EML) wrote:
>> I think the problem is that XML on the web (specifically in the
>>browser) isn't there yet. For example, prior to Java it was also possible
to
>>do Tic-Tac-Toe (or "Noughts and Crosses" as we call it in England) as a
>>Plugin, and you could do the legwork of doing 2 plugins if you wanted to
>>support both IE and Netscape. Java changed that. What XML in the browser
>>will give us is this sort of benefit (and I don't mean
>>WriteOnceRunEverywhere) - it will reduce the amount of code needed to do
>>things like search product catalogues, import external data, etc. Yes,
it's
>>still plumbing in a way, the difference might just be in time to market
>>though. Got XML, got XSL - you can display it. This is a whole lot simpler
>>than a backend connected to a database that creates HTML.
>>
>> Matt.
>>
>
>
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