Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Add-on or Major Redesign?

This is as much an assessment for scoping your project as it is a choice to make. You need to determine whether you are going to add incremental functionality and modules or whether you are going to do a major application redesign for XML. Depending on several factors, XML might be supported as just one more import/export format. Here are a few criteria to bear in mind when making the assessment.

• What language is your application written in, and what is your development environment? We touched on this briefly in Chapter 1 and will discuss it more later, but here's a basic assessment. If your application is written in Java, C++, or Visual Basic, or if your development and runtime environment supports linking with modules ...