Building Oracle XML Applications

Why Should I Use XML?

Why have vendors like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, SAP, and many others moved so fast to support XML? After all, these companies have worked for many years to fine-tune the efficiency of their proprietary data formats and tools. The reason is simple: as a vendor-neutral, platform-neutral, language-neutral technology for web-based data exchange, the XML family of standards solves a key problem for these companies’ customers. In a nutshell, XML simplifies the task of connecting applications and services over the Web.

XML Enables a Data Web of Information Services

Proprietary data formats undoubtedly represent data in a more efficient way, but what XML sacrifices in compactness, it gains many times over in flexibility. If you can publish an XML datagram on the “wire,” anyone connected to the Internet can receive the datagram, parse it, manipulate it, search it, and transform it using a wide selection of freely available tools that implement the XML family of standards. Skeptics who dwell on XML’s apparent inefficiencies (“It’s more tags than data, for heaven’s sake!,” they say), haven’t yet understood how its usefulness grows when it is combined with the Internet’s universal reach. The HTML standard and the essentially free cost of HTML-savvy browsers sparked the creation of the Web as we know it today: a sea of information available 24 hours a day for a pair of human eyeballs focused on a browser to exploit. The XML family of standards and the low cost of many ...