Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

Data Formatting Issues

If you use HTTP or a custom socket protocol, you must also consider how to format data. B2B applications are one of the places where XML is the most useful. You can use a Document Type Definition (DTD) to specify the format of the XML documents you will accept. As XML Schema becomes more popular, you will be able to provide a more accurate description of your data format.

When you use XML for B2B data exchange, you also gain the ability to use XSL to reformat the data for various customers. Depending on your application (and your customers) you might need to format data different ways for different customers. To minimize the amount of custom work you need to do, you can create different XSL transformations for different ...