Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Why Refine the Design?

So, what place does this chapter have in the book and in the overall scheme of things? Why am I bothering to refine the design? Well, I'm trying to achieve several overall goals with this book. One of the goals is to provide people with some working, simple utilities to perform several different types of common data format conversion tasks. It will save us time and effort if we lay out a design with some specific parameters and focus strongly on reusability.

Another goal is to design these utilities so that you can easily modify them if you need to add or change the functionality. So, we also want to focus on extensibility and maintainability. The utilities we developed up to this point were primarily focused on simple ...