Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

What Should Be “XMLized”?

Even though John Muir lived before the age of computers and thought in terms of the natural world, I don't think he would be too surprised to learn that his observation holds true for the world of business applications. Very few of our business applications are used completely stand-alone; they almost always share data and have interactions with other applications. The data sharing may be crude and the interactions made by humans, but the “hitching” is still there. So, the easy answer to identifying what we should turn into XML is this: Anything that can be consumed by another application or produced by another application for yours to consume is a candidate for representation in an XML format. This is consistent with ...