The inaugural issue of XML-Journal was published in the first quarter of the new millennium. Then just two years old, XML already seemed to hold almost unlimited promise, and few seemed to doubt that XML technologies had excellent prospects for the 21st century that lay ahead of us. But unlike most other turn-of-the-century technology, XML has flourished slowly and steadily, including through the dot-com meltdown.

How can it be that, for once, the early promise didn't turn out to be just techno-hype and folderol? In the same time period wireless technologies (in the enterprise, anyway) have distinctly wilted; yet XML technologies have steadily blossomed. Vertical after vertical has spawned its own subset of XML, and within any given area of business, interoperability has moved from being an optional extra to being the centerpiece of the entire new e-commerce landscape.

Most unusual of all, XML has moved far beyond the technical domain and into the business mainstream, and it's as a reflection of this last development that we bring you a more enterprise-oriented XML-Journal. In other words, there'll now be as much in each issue for the business audience as for the application developers.

Application developers, of course, will also benefit from this new widening and deepening of scope. On hearing of our plans, the "father" of XML technologies, Charles F. Goldfarb, commented: "Adding a business perspective is a great idea for XML-J. I've long preached that developers need to know why their code is wanted to do the best job."

Henceforth, then, XML-J will cover much more closely the impact that XML technologies are having on companies, and the successes and failures of those that have been implementing them. We'll be aiming at the entire enterprise hierarchy - CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, vice presidents, directors, programmers, engineers, and line-of-business managers - all who recognize the need to understand that XML plays a role in how their business systems interact with other systems and with the outside world. By the way, in this issue alone are articles from employees of SAIC, EDS, and Deloitte & Touche, some of the largest consulting organizations in the world.

In line with this development, founding editor Ajit Sagar, who we "borrowed" from Java Developer's Journal to get XML-J up and running, returns exclusively to JDJ, where he has simultaneously been editing the all-important J2EE section. With this current issue he passes the torch of the world's leading XML print (and online) resource to a new pair of hands.

Well, to two new pairs of hands, in fact.

The new editors-in-chief of XML-J (plural - there are two of them because in our view the scope of XML has widened and deepened beyond the capacity of any sole editor to encompass alone) are JP Morgenthal and John Evdemon, longtime members of the editorial advisory board that has helped steer the magazine through its first phase. We welcome them both as the new custodians of the magazine in this next exciting phase, the phase we've nicknamed XML-J 2.0.

Both are well known in the industry. They bring to XML-J an enviable mix of talents. John has served as CTO/director of XML-related products for both a large integration platform vendor and a small XML-centric startup and has been working with XML since its early beginnings. An invited expert with the W3C XML Core Syntax Working Group, he has chaired several industry-specific XML initiatives and has been involved with both ebXML and Web services since their inception.

JP is known to many as coauthor of Enterprise Application Integration with XML & Java, one of the most popular books in the Charles Goldfarb XML Series for Prentice-Hall. An independent IT consultant specializing in Web services/SOAP, XML, Java/J2EE, CRM, and supply-chain management, he is an internationally prominent expert on the design and implementation of distributed systems for the enterprise.

Our new coeditors-in-chief join me and everyone else at SYS-CON Media in extending our warm thanks to their predecessor for having the vision to lead XML-J from its tentative inception to its present robust and healthy state.

In his first editorial, Ajit prophetically called XML "a technology that has revolutionized electronic commerce and enterprise computing and is going to completely refurbish the face of business as we know it today." The hope for XML then matches the reality now, and XML-J has become the industry's one-stop shop for all matters XML.

But neither Ajit nor anyone else could have known back then that analyst predictions today would say that by 2005, in the financial services industry alone, XML Web services will be an $8 billion industry. That is a great deal of money, and that's just one vertical.

Beyond a doubt, XML is much more now than the technological plat du jour. It's going to be on the menu of international business for a long, long time. And we hope you'll continue to enjoy XML-J's coverage for just as long.