You might have seen the recent news reports about the collision between U.S. and Russian communication satellites. The U.S. satellite was one of the Iridium satellites. What wasn’t reported and you probably don’t know is that an object database management system (ODBMS) is an important part of the Iridium system. Even though ODBMSs are a [...]
February 13, 2009
I am now also posting on the Cutter Blog. My initial posting is (The Acronym) SOA is (Perhaps) Dead (at Some Companies); Long Live Services. It is a response to Anne Thomas Manes’ SOA is Dead; Long Live Services on her blog at the Burton Group.
January 9, 2009
The typical definition of an atomic task or process is one that cannot be decomposed further. This is vague and subject to interpretation. The Decomposition Matrix on this site uses a specific definition: A task (for business process diagrams) or a process (for data flow diagrams) is atomic if every input relates to every output [...]
December 3, 2008
My last posting referenced the criteria for a well-formed business process diagram mentioned in Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL by Matjaz B. Juric and Kapil Pant. I am going to expand on their criteria to create a more comprehensive definition of a well-formed business process diagram. To start, here are three criteria [...]
November 18, 2008
I recently received two new books on business process modeling. Both books looked interesting because they had great titles. As it turns out, one book is great and the other not so good. The not so good book is Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL by Matjaz B. Juric and Kapil Pant. There [...]
October 9, 2008
The Design Decomposition Blog is written by Doug Barry.
XML shares common origins with HTML and SGML. SGML or "Standard Generalized Markup Language" was issued as an international standard (ISO 8879) in 1986. It was intended for semantic markup that would assist computer cataloging and indexing. SGML provided flexibility that had not been available before and became very popular and was applied in many ways beyond the intentions of the original developers. It was, however, very complex and expensive.
Brief history
About 1990, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN developed a new, simpler language that could be used in place of SGML. Thus was born HTML or "Hyper Text Markup Language." It was intended to be a simpler language that did not require expensive authoring tools. HTML succeeded beyond anyone's expectations but it lacked a certain flexibility that developers wanted. Various groups made changes and added extensions until HTML's roots had been mangled.
In the summer of 1996, a working group at W3C was formed to create a markup language that would combine the strength of SGML with the simplicity of HTML. The first official draft specification for XML was released in November 1996.
XML version 1.0 became a W3C recommendation in 1998.
XML appeared just as the growth of the Web has increased the number of developers who demand the ease and flexibility that it provides.
Presentation, Communication and Storage of Data
The basic structure of XML is the document. This terminology, however, might cause one to think of XML as only a richer, more flexible HTML. It is richer and more flexible, but it can be so much more as well.
Thinking of XML as a document allows you to see how it can be used for presentation of data. This presentation can be detailed and useful.
Most browsers now handle XML for presentation.
XML does, however, actually go beyond documents. It can be used for the communication of data as well. XML uses a flexible tagged structure that makes it more robust than a fixed record format for communication.
See Web services (new window).
Finally, XML can also be used to define the storage of data. The same flexible tagged structure can be used when storing data.
See XML databases (new window).
There are nearly 400 pages of articles on this site with over 100 pages on XML background, specifications, and vocabularies.
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