Many applications, including ESBs and Application Servers from Oracle and Sun, consume SAML assertions. Testing these applications can be a chore, since they require using a toolkit or API to create a SAML assertion. A good alternative is to use the free Vordel SOAPbox product includes...

Did you know that the free SOAPbox Web Services testing tool includes the ability to generate X.509 Certificates and keys? Just select "View Certificates" from the "Security" menu and press "Create".

Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your ...

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is more than a simple syntax for Internet transport. It entails a new way of thinking about information. Different communities embrace the language for different reasons. Its platform and vendor neutrality make it a natural format for Service Oriente...

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services (along with the underlying XML protocol) promise to greatly simplify the implementation of distributed computing applications, both within the enterprise and between enterprises. The widespread acceptance of Web Services across opera...

This article looks in detail at how to generate XML data from your relational database. Although the examples were run on Oracle, very little of the code is Oracle specific. You can easily use all the ideas and examples presented here in other relational databases. We did this project ...

While there are many standards that look like ebXML, ebXML is the first horizontal standard designed to address the exchange of information and adherence to inter-enterprise processes. However, in attempting to reach this lofty goal, ebXML is also a complex standard and takes some unde...

Many in the world of application integration have begun to adopt the notion of ontology (or the instances of ontology: ontologies). Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how they are related.

Although a number of standards exist for information interchange and process definition, industry standards have yet to emerge for defining common integration server and B2B integration server services such as routing, rules processing, and transformation. In the absence of such standa...

The fever for new XML specifications for almost anything imaginable has hit the real estate industry. Companies that are actively pursuing some niche in this industry have realized the need to create and adopt standards for communication.

Traditionally, APIs for processing XML have been categorized according to whether they're designed for processing entire XML documents loaded in memory, such as the W3C DOM, or for processing XML in a streaming, forward-only fashion, such as SAX.

Organizations have evolved a variety of systems to deal with the increasing levels of information they must regularly process to remain competitive. Business Process Management (BPM) systems presently take a wide variety of shapes, often including large amounts of ad hoc scripting ...

Examples of selecting data from a database to produce XML are not too difficult to find. A Google search or a visit to the XML section at your local bookstore will no doubt reveal several such examples. It can, however, be more difficult to locate examples of how to insert data fro...

A URIResolver, an interface defined in the javax.xml.transform package, is used to process a URI and create a Source object out of it. All Java developers working with XSLT have to decide which URIResolver they're going to use to resolve the URI.

We encounter many statements and reports in our day-to-day lives. Phone bills, utility bills, bank statements, and investment account statements are a few examples. More and more, the companies that produce these statements are making them available online, on demand through the Web. S...

The XSLT version 1.0 language definition has been an official recommendation of the W3C since 1999. Its use has expanded dramatically in the past 18 months, for processing XML and XML/SOAP security policies and for generating HTML Web pages.

As a corporate trainer of Internet technologies, I've often run into situations where a company will look at a set of courses within a curriculum and say, 'I want Section 2 of that course, followed by Section 4 from this other course, and then we've got a real-world project we would li...

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) W3C recommendation was created as a means to display XML data. The recommendation includes a transformation language (XSLT) and formatting object (or output format) language (XSL-FO), which together provide the XSL stylesheet developer with the ...

MathML is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard that has been created so that mathematical expressions can be displayed, manipulated, and shared over the Web. According to the W3C, 'The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide...

XSLT is a declarative language designed for transforming XML documents into documents in any format. In developing large-scale XSLT scripts, software qualities such as flexibility and maintainability become issues. To address those issues, this article will first discuss a design appro...

Industry consortia are increasingly coming together to draw up XML standards for businesses. One of the major emerging standards is XBRL: eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Organized by more than 170 finance, accounting, regulatory, and software companies from across the world, XB...

Since their inception in 1993, HTML forms have come to be the underpinnings of user interaction on the World Wide Web. The convenience afforded by the ability to provide consistent end-user access to information and application services via a universal Web browser created a platform-in...

Infotronics is a term used to describe in-vehicle multimedia, telematics, and infotainment technologies, which can be divided into a number of functional areas, such as vehicle integration, remote vehicle services, and near-vehicle interaction.

The XSL-FO 1.0 Recommendation is now more than a year old, and it's exciting to see a number of commercial implementations and open-source or free projects available for the Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects. One such implementation is at Crane Softwrights Ltd., where X...

Information interchange has become key to survival in an increasingly wired world. It is in this context that industries have adopted XML as the enabling mechanism to achieve application integration. XML is ideally suited for designing a Web application that has multiple pages, some of...

In my free time, I've been working on a CMS/Portal application using Java and XML. I was glad to discover some XML database tools that are now available - as more and more data is being stored and transmitted in XML format, XML databases are worth considering. Moving an XML application...

The Web has given us an easy-to-use, easy-to-market, and easy-to-navigate medium for conducting business. We've come to a stage where mainstream people are comfortable shopping on the Web. What it lacks is the ability to ensure that what the end user has browsed or accepted is the same...

The many people and organizations who came to the XML industry from the database and software development industries have always wanted better standards for modeling the native data structures they interchange in XML. Some support for this was always likely in developing the XML Sc...

The automotive industry has been a leader in the use of EDI and EDIFACT over the past 20 years. The deployment of EDI processes down the supply chain has not been uniform, and a common expression to use is the '80/20' rule (e.g., 80% of EDI messages are sent by 20% of the companies...

Web services is a glamorous term for a very old and established idea. The core Web services technologies, SOAP and WSDL, allow developers to define new protocols. A protocol is nothing more than a way for computer programs to talk to each other over computer networks. As long as there ...

In the world of automation, the ambiguous can be a beautiful thing or it can be a nightmare. To those responsible for delivering a solution, ambiguity leads to missed expectations, higher costs for delivery, and delays in completion. To those providing solutions, ambiguity leads to opp...

XML is, among many other things, a data-encoding standard for network protocols. What's known as 'XML' in the community or the trade press is actually a large collection of protocols and data-handling systems that use XML-encoded packets or instructions.

Schema languages are languages that allow you to specify the structure of XML instance documents. RELAX NG (see www.relaxng.org) is an XML schema language that is considered to be simple, yet powerful. This article gives an overview of an important concept of the RELAX NG schema langua...

Of all of the possible technologies to arise out of the first consumer Internet revolution, instant messaging (IM) is a bit of an enigma. Its incredible popularity challenges that of the Internet's first 'killer app,' e-mail, yet it does so mostly by offering the features of e-mail in ...

Over the past few years there has been an emergence of registries due to the lack of organization of the World Wide Web. These registries provide a mechanism to centrally organize information in a way that makes it easier for both people and machines to locate the required sources of i...

XSLT is generally used to parse and translate XML files, but with some more advanced techniques, it's possible to search for specific attributes (or elements) of any XML document or list of documents.

On a recent trip overseas I neglected to pack the adapter plugs that enable you to plug an electrical cord from one country into an outlet in another. If you travel overseas you soon realize that many countries have incompatible electrical outlets.

I and a colleague were working on a research project when we saw an opportunity to approach our data management from a different angle. XML appeared on the scene, and when IBM alphaWorks released its first parser we were on our way, using XML to solve our data access problems.

It's quite common for developers to present data from the database (or elsewhere) for analysis by more than one team in an organization. Over the years, Microsoft's Excel has been one of the preferred tools for spreadsheet-type reports. Now, in combination with XML technologies, we ca...

As a substitute for handcrafting, most word processing and desktop publishing tools lack the capability to produce the detailed design and sophistication that normally accompany high-end page layouts. And companies, of course, are always looking for the most cost-effective way to deliv...