Commerce One, the leader in global e-commerce solutions for business, and Rational Software, the e-development company, have announced the industry`s first UML (Unified Modelling Language) for XML (Extensible Markup Language) schema mapping specification.
This announcement underscores both companies` belief in XML as a key enabler of e-commerce.
The Rational-Commerce One collaboration provides a standard method to reduce the development time and increase the quality of schema-based, XML e-commerce applications. UML is poised to become the industry-standard language for specifying, visualising, constructing, and documenting software systems, says Themi Themistocleous, director of local Rational distributor CCH Software Development.
"The rapid change of the Internet has created an e-software paradox for organisations - requiring that they deliver software faster while still achieving high quality," says Themistocleous. This collaboration lays the foundation for developers to improve the efficiency and quality of XML schema code by using the UML for visual modelling."
XML schema is emerging as a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation for the definition of XML and is believed to provide a safer and more reliable way to define XML messages for use in e-commerce systems. By adding mechanisms for strong data validation, inheritance and other object-oriented structures not present in the document type definition (DTD), developers can have a more efficient way to visually model e-business solutions.
The Rational-Commerce One UML profile today will provide developers with a systematic, graphical methodology for creating XML schemas.
"To take advantage of the power of XML, the pioneers at the cutting edge have spent the last few years struggling to express XML-based applications in UML. The development of a sophisticated XML schema language and a standard mapping of that into the UML provides the power of XML to application developers in a straightforward and standard way," says Dr Matthew Fuchs, co-author of the UML specification and a charter member of the W3C XML Schema Working Group.
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