'Interest in real time 3D on the Web is increasing after the long lull,' writes Len Bullard. 'Perhaps among all of the efforts,' he continues, 'a genuine market will emerge and that will create a visible and undeniable need for convergence. Give it ten years.'

When I started to think about writing this month's column I looked on the Internet for a good way to define service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some of the definitions were interesting, like 'A Service Oriented Architecture is basically a Collection of Services' (www.service-architecture .com/). Others were a little bit more technical, such as 'SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents' (www.xml.com).

Web services provide the architecture for allowing different systems to interoperate. By removing many of the challenges associated with systems integration, Web services allow organizations to achieve significant business results with current systems.

This morning I find myself pondering one of the more subtle coincidences of my daily life: this month my company, Altova, launched not only a formal standards-based XML certification exam, but also new training classes for our first systems integration-oriented tool, MAPFORCE. Beyond the blatant plug for my team's work, why is the proximity of these two very different educational efforts interesting?

2003 was definitely a positive year for the economy and the world of i-technology - and the year's success also raised the bar for what needs to happen in 2004, if we really want to see recovery. Although this statement focuses on financial aspects, it provides an indication of what we need in the world of information technology - a focus on delivering value out of the whole standardization story.

Web Services for Remote Portlets, or WSRP, was recently approved as a standard by OASIS. Although a number of Web services standards are being worked on by different OASIS technical committees (TCs) - around Web services orchestration, management, security, reliable messaging, and ebXML - WSRP is particularly interesting as it brings out the benefits of open standards-based Web standards to the world of enterprise portals.

2003 has been an exciting year so far for XML and Web services technologies and standardization. Most of the focus has been on stabilization of existing initiatives and making XML-based communications more robust, secure, and manageable.

I'm one of those technology enthusiasts who like to be on the edge, which means that if I'm not creating news, I at least like to read a lot to keep up with the rapidly changing world of technology. A part of my morning (and sometimes even my night) is spent taking a good look at some of the popular technology Web sites.

Microsoft's flagship technology conference, commonly known as Tech·Ed, was held in Dallas in early June. Much has been written elsewhere about this event, but I would like to point out a couple of things I thought were quite significant, from an XML perspective.

Even though interoperability and making systems and enterprises work together have been the main goals of XML and Web services technologies and standards, the quest for a better way to develop applications has led XML in another direction: around consuming XML/Web services to developing modular and dynamic user interfaces.

On February 10, 1998, a revolutionary Internet technology child was born into this world and given an acronym that has since become synonymous with i-technology itself. Even though it enters only its sixth year this month, XML has had a widespread effect on the nature of generations of technology to follow.

One of the key reasons behind the explosive growth of the Web is the simplicity and ease of use of the underlying standards - TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML. Experts and critics have often argued about what's wrong with HTML and HTTP and why we need IPv6 et al. For instance, with the advent of XHTML, we are now realizing why HTML should have probably been XML-ized from Day 1; similarly, we criticize the fact that HTTP is stateless. However, the ubiquity of these standards has easily surpassed their technological imperfections.

XML is a relatively simple development. Yet it has probably been the most powerful development to date in the world of i-Technology. From being the launchpad for information delivery on the Web (XHTML, SMIL, SVG) to electronic business communication (Chem standards, ebXML, RosettaNet, OAGIS, EDI/XML), security (SAML), Web services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, BPEL4WS), data transformation (XSLT/XSL), and speech recognition and telephony integration (CCXML, SALT, VoiceXML), XML has quickly grown as the universal markup language to define practically anything.

The XML 1.0 Technical Recommendation was approved in 1998, with a corrective release (termed the 'Second Edition') in 2000. The popularity of XML and XML-related initiatives has far surpassed the expectations of the original XML Working Group. The XML 1.0 Technical Recommendation (TR) has been, without a doubt, one of the most popular and successful developments of the W3C.

Instant Messaging (IM) systems have historically leveraged XML as a messaging protocol. The power and flexibility of XML allow IM systems to clearly identify the content and meaning of messages moving through the system.

With the advent of computer storage, business has become increasingly more reliant on electronic information as a major source for maintenance and continued growth. The information we store electronically tells us what customers like and dislike, how much material to buy, and where we spend our money. Typically all this information is stored and accessed directly through applications.

There's been much recent controversy about the role of Microsoft and IBM in the evolution of Web services standards. At a conference I attended not so long ago a pundit talked about the 'standard setting duopoly.' Several articles have been written about the 'undemocratic' practices of WS-I. Are things really that bad?

As the 1970s drew to a close, Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' first appeared on BBC radio. 'Hitchhiker's Guide' was (and continues to be) wildly successful - the series was adapted into a four-book 'trilogy' and a hit TV show. 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' featured a wonderful mix of Monty Python-like humor, science fiction, and science fact. One of the most intriguing ideas offered was the now infamous Babel fish.

While I understand that technology adoption occurs in steps, moving from simple to more complex, I'm amazed by how many people in the computing industry still don't have an understanding of what XML is and what problems it enables solutions for. I'm even more amazed by the people who are still using XML as a data format for systems integration.

The publisher of XML-Journal, SYS-CON Media, is always looking to widen and deepen its coverage of the i-technologies that are covered by its world-beating stable of publications.

(This editorial is in two parts. Part 1, below, is by John Evdemon. Part 2, by JP Morgenthal, then follows.)XML-Journal recently posted a special article online (at www.sys-con.com/xml) celebrating XML's fourth birthday. It's hard to believe the little toddler has grown up to become a preschooler. When XML was first introduced back in February 1998 it was designed to be a Web-based version of SGML. Indeed, the W3C XML Technical Recommendation states its goal as enabling a 'generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.'

The XML landscape has been changing at the speed of light in the last couple of years. The rapid evolutions and new additions to the XML universe have increased in frequency even as the technologies and markets around it have consolidated. Add new paradigms such as Web services to the mix and you see XML blazing a trail that might seem to the nontechnical observer hard to keep track of.

A large part of business application development deals with abstracting the software components and services that enable the implementation of industry domain-specific business processes into a design environment that is used to model the design of the business process itself. One of the biggest challenges in achieving this goal is to bridge the gaps between disparate environments that combine to provide a comprehensive solution. Gaps exist at different levels and on different levels and manifest themselves in different tiers of the distributed enterprise.

Have you ever been called an XML developer or XML programmer? While processing XML in programs has become a common task for computer programmers, XML is used only in the context of some other programming language environment, such as Java, C++, and Web programming languages. We've all become accustomed to the presence of XML in the very guts of our applications over the last couple of years. Most IDEs in the market today offer tools for manipulating XML for the purpose of creating and deploying software components.

Last year marked another significant period in the evolution of new technologies. Some of these evolutions reflect the various changes that we've seen in the economy. We saw Web services gain momentum, but skepticism still looms regarding the business models to which they'll eventually apply. XML has been firmly steeped in the very essence of most forms of data exchange via the Internet. At the same time, traditional mechanisms of data storage and exchange, namely the ERP and the RDBMS technologies, still control the real business tier.

Recently I did an analysis of Verticalnet's ontology-based tools. It's interesting that as soon as you say the word ontology, people start wondering what they are and what they're good for. I went through a learning process this myself recently and would like to share my findings with you. Ontologies, of course, are closely related to the world of XML

I just got back from the Web Services Edge/XMLEdge conference hosted by SYS-CON Media in Santa Clara, California. Although attendance was lower than usual, this wasn't unexpected and the show was quite well received by both vendors and attendees. Look for the XMLEdge show report later in this issue.

It seems that the only constant in life is change - sometimes the change is unexpected, unwanted, unwarranted. The tragic events of September 11 have left their mark. As I sat down to write this month's editorial, my mind wandered back to the way life was, and how it's changed for all of us.

Last week my wife and I decided to test out a new restaurant on the basis of a friend's recommendation. In retrospect, I can definitely say that it was one of the worst Indian restaurants we've ever dined in. We were impressed by the name, which indicated that we were in for a delicious treat. My wife asked, 'Shouldn't they have some certification process before they can publish that name and get bragging rights?' I couldn't agree more. And, as always, my mind wandered back to the realm of IT, software, and, specifically, XML.

In my teens I was an avid reader of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books. You may be familiar with the TV series also. Last week my mom, who is visiting us here in the U.S., made an interesting observation when she was going through one of Gardner's books. She said: 'You know, Paul Drake [the detective] always used to go to a public telephone booth to make a call to Perry. When you called me from your mobile phone, it occurred to me that in today's world, Paul would be in a car or on a bus or train and making that same call from a cell phone.'

Typically, when a new technology is introduced in the computing world, it's first met with skepticism. This is followed by the hype that presents it as the solution to all computing problems. Over the course of the next few years, the technology is applied to real-world business area applications and reality sets in. As a community of developers emerges and jobs in the technology manifest in the industry, the challenges of educating the community on its usage present themselves. Training the work force becomes a daunting task, especially in the extremely short time frame as allowed by the ever-shrinking 'Internet year.'

I spent the last weekend childproofing our house. You see, my 11 month-old son has been in India for the last three months with his grandparents. We are going there this weekend to pick him up. I've heard he now moves around speedily and is not easily fooled by an adult's tricks. Anyway, as I was screwing on latches for drawers and cabinets and installing the famous gate needed in any house with stairs, my mind kept wandering to how a nerd like me could do such a good job with hardware.

Folks, before I tell you about the exciting events that are taking place in the SYS-CON-XML community, I'd like to take a moment to introduce the new editorial board for XML-J. These well-known leaders and experts in the XML industry are going to take this already fine publication to even greater heights.

I'm on a trip to the holy land, Jerusalem, and writing this editorial from my hotel room, which overlooks the old city. As always, I find myself drawing parallels between what I experience in life and what I come across in technology.

No application server worth its salt has any staying power in the market today if the vendor offering it doesn't have the acronym 'XML' in its white paper. This is true. Don't just take my word for it; go to any of the existing app server vendor sites and search. If you find that 'XML' doesn't occupy prominent space, chances are that the vendor doesn't have much of a presence in the market.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in several technical meetings to define the next phase of the architecture of our current products. As usual, any initiatives for a new architecture include requirement considerations for open APIs, platform independence, and loose coupling between components as the basic criteria for the design of the platform components. Our architecture is based on J2EE and XML. The APIs that are exposed by the infrastructure can be categorized into the programmatic APIs that are exposed through object methods and structural APIs. J2EE offers the available programmatic (method-call based) APIs as a programmatic interface. XML offers an effective way of exposing structural APIs. It also provides an elegant mechanism for achieving configuration for the deployment of applications.

I spent most of last week helping our company host one of our Japanese partners for business and technology discussions. Part of my responsibility as an architect is to help figure out how our architecture and product line can be used in different scenarios. To do this for a company halfway 'round the globe, extremely long words with the funny alphanumeric acronyms suddenly become very important. I am, of course, talking about I18N (internationalization) and L10N (localization). I'm sure most of you know how those acronyms were formed. The number in the acronym is related to the number of characters in the word. The combination of the two is termed globalization. In the software world, this equates to the promise of ultimate platform-independent nirvana. The definitions for these terms, according to the book CJKV Information Processing by Ken Lunde and Gigi Estabrook (O'Reilly), is given below:

Welcome to XML-J 2001! Thanks to your support and readership we've successfully completed the first year of this magazine - our circulation has doubled every month since our first issue in March 2000. This validates several beliefs on which this magazine was started. One was that there was a need in the market for a single source that could offer the latest information on XML - a technology that has facilitated more unification in the computing community than many previous technologies combined. Indeed, it seems that the giants of the industry, including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Sun, are agreeing on some emerging universal standards as XML has evolved. Let's hope this trend continues.

In the software industry today as we address the interenterprise and its business problems, the solutions to these problems are becoming increasingly complex. They span several tiers of distributed systems and involve several disjointed applications that must somehow talk to each other - efficiently, repeatedly, and securely. Enterprise applications must meet the stringent requirements placed on performance, reliability, flexibility, and ease of use. One of the biggest challenges is that information must be integrated from disparate, loosely coupled systems both within and between businesses (B2B) to support electronic business. Doing business over the Internet demands high performance, low latency, and reliable data exchange across large networked systems.

This month I'd like to continue on the theme of technology reincarnation that Israel Hilerio introduced in October's editorial. Technologies undergo a life cycle. Some of the facets of this life cycle are repeated among the different technologies. XML is no exception. However, the challenge is accepting an entity, be it a technology or a person, for what it is. Everything has a natural place and order in this universe, including specific technologies. The origin of an entity plays an important role in determining its role in the computing universe.