Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Making XML the Common Format

In the first chapter we set central roles in our overall architecture for XML as the “common denominator” format and logical conversions via XSLT (as opposed to the syntax conversions that the conversion utilities perform). However, it's time we expanded on those concepts and got a bit more specific. Not only do we want XML to be the common format but also wherever possible we want the data content to be compliant with native schema language data types. This means, for example, that a date in our common XML format is expressed, compliant with ISO 8601 and the schema date data type, as 2002-09-06 instead of 06-Sep-2002 or 9/6/02. A dollar amount that might be expressed in a COBOL extract file or in X12 EDI as a number ...