Chapter 10
(e)Xplaining XML
In This Chapter
(e)Xplaining XML
Discovering Web Services
Dining on SOA alphabet soup
Finding out why you need SOAP (and WSDL)
According to the biblical story, early humanity was once united as one people and, in its overweening pride, started to build a tower to reach the heavens. God decided to stop the project and did so without resorting to fire or brimstone. He simply confused the languages of the participants. Pretty soon, work on the project stopped, and humanity never spoke with a single tongue again. The place was called Babel.
Today, the computer industry (not satisfied with the mere 6,000-odd human languages) has created some 8,000 computer languages. The number of human languages is on the decline, by the way, but the number of computer languages persists in climbing. In a world where everybody claims to want to be able to talk to everybody else, such a multiplicity of languages indicates that there’s definitely a fly in the IT ointment.
This chapter describes how programs and business services can get around the problem of being written in different computer languages so these services can be loosely connected. The alternative would be to write complicated code each time an organization needs to connect components or programs together — and that would be unmanageable. This is why XML is so important.
My Computer Is a Lousy Linguist
So here’s the problem: The world of computing is awash with programming languages. Even though there is a ...
