Chapter 13. Trends and Directions

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • XML query language

  • RDF and the Semantic Web

  • Future of web application frameworks

  • Current trends

OBJECTIVES

  • Examine new and emerging technologies.

  • Review XML Query.

  • Introduce the Semantic Web and provide an overview of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF applications.

  • Speculate about the future of web application frameworks.

  • Discuss current trends in web technology.

Rapid expansion of Internet technologies has come at the cost of technological incompatibilities and inconsistencies, which have put much strain on the web application development process. Today, after more than 15 years of exponential growth, Internet technologies are finally becoming stable and robust. We are seeing encouraging examples of technology convergence. XHTML has supplanted HTML, WML is being phased out and replaced with XHTML MP (see Section 5.2.2), and the relationship between XSL, XSLT, XSLFO, and other style sheet specifications has been clarified (see Section 5). The most recent specifications from the World Wide Web Consortium and other standards-setting bodies, including the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)[16] and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS),[17] concentrate on achieving improvements to accepted and emerging technologies, as well as convergence between them, as opposed to dramatic new directions.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to the leading specification for querying ...

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