Essential XML: Beyond Markup

Documents as Messages

To integrate software agents using XML, it is necessary but not necessarily sufficient to agree on how instances of application-specific types will be represented in XML. In order for these representations to be useful, some context is needed for defining when and where these representations will reside, how they will be transmitted, and the action that should be taken upon the receipt of a serialized instance. One way to provide this context is to model the serialized instance as a message that is transmitted from a sender to a receiver. By viewing an XML document as a transient message as opposed to a persistent well-known resource, one can easily adapt existing messaging/RPC communication models to use XML as their message ...