XML and the art of getting Net businesses to talk

Entry to the Internet is finally possible for companies whose antiquated 'legacy' software has proved largely uncommunicative in the New Economy. Their saviour comes in the form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a programming language, which enables different IT systems to speak to one another. XML also helps the Internet make good on its promise of connecting the world's businesses into one universal marketplace thereby greatly minimising the cost of doing business.

Most of the world's data is trapped within legacy systems which cannot even interact with each other, let alone Web-based or e-commerce applications. Now, technologies based on XML can help companies unlock the value in their old legacy systems by making the data they hold accessible across the Internet.

Whereas previously companies conducting business electronically had to set up telephone-based EDI networks, the costs of which run into millions, XML allows systems to share data and systems at a fraction of the price. Once these systems can speak to one another, the implications for business are significant. Companies will save money by hanging onto to their existing IT systems and they'll be able to begin transacting in the global marketplace without incurring the huge costs of replacing their legacy software. This allows them to trade more efficiently and significantly minimise the cost of doing business.

An excellent example is Galileo International Inc., a 30-year-old business which connects travel agencies with airlines, hotels, and car-rental companies. They have converted their central reservation system to service a variety of Internet systems using an XML application interface that allow customers and their developers to create high-volume, Web-based booking engines and server-based applications.

Bob Bora, business analyst for Interfaces of Apple Vacations said in a recent article, "Working with XML Select has cut our development time in half compared to similar interfaces, with initial prototype results showing significantly faster responses. We welcome the cutting edge technology that Galileo offers to the travel industry and look forward to future development efforts."

The implications for the growth of business-to-business e-commerce globally are also significant as far more companies can join the global marketplace without the huge costs of replacing legacy software. It is widely accepted that the adoption of XML standards will greatly simplify the process of connecting to large procurement exchanges such as Commerce One and Ariba. XML is expected to be the main technical driver of B2B growth over the next decade.

Before SalesBid's launch in April last year, we made the decision to utilise XML as the standard interface to our products. This has allowed for a much faster development cycle driven by a small team of people. Even more significantly, it allowed our products to easily integrate with our customers' backend systems.

While not the cure-all it is often unfairly hyped to be, XML provides the underlying mechanism to answer most complex integration issues in remarkably simple ways. XML data is platform independent as all operating systems can read text formats. It is also becoming software independent as most new software systems are beginning to be written to read in XML and to send their data as XML.

XML is a fundamentally simple method of managing structured data. As long as two companies both use XML - even if those XML structures were somewhat different, the integration is made less painful if there is a simple method of translating company A's XML structure to company B's structure.

In order to understand XML, examine the simple XML data packet that follows, describing customer John Smith's contact details, including his address and phone numbers:

<Customer>
<FirstName>John</FirstName>
<LastName>Smith</LastName>
<Street>1 Church Street</Street>
<City>Pretoria</City>
<Telephones>
<Home>(012) 555-5555</Home>
<Work>(012) 555-5556</Work>
<Cell>(082) 555-5555</Cell>

</Telephones>
<Customer>

What is striking about this is that there are no gobbledygook computer characters. Ordinary people easily understand the information. And unlike ugly binary code this information can be stored as text.

XML is not a panacea for every case as its somewhat verbose structure does not lend itself to, say, a high-load banking system that handles thousands of transactions per second in real-time. But over the next decade we will see gradual adoption of data standards on an industry by industry basis with XML being the foundation of a far more complex structure of interconnections allowing us to inevitably approach the goal of one world-wide fluid universal marketplace, with groups of interoperating businesses gaining massive efficiencies through co-operating IT systems.