5/14/04
<< 72 Squared WeblogThe wonderful diversity of xml
There seems to be no end to the applications developers have found for XML. RSS feeds, Soap Web Services, database structures. A whole new world has been opened through the power of a simle extensible markup language.
A few days ago I needed my web server to send out a fax. After only a few minutes of searching google, I found a company that allowed me to set up an account with them and send them a message in WSDL from my server telling them to send a fax for me. It only took a few minutes of configuration I was sending faxes effortlessly from my server without having to make a single hardware configuration change.
My first project involving XML involved converting database records into an XML document that could be imported with Quark.Avenue (still in beta, at the time) to create a printed product guide. Quark allows you to apply style-sheets to the placeholders and format them, so that when the XML document is imported into Quark you end up with a document ready for print, with little or no editing necessary. (Ironically, the final release of Quark.Avenue is more buggy than the beta). I couple years ago I was building a rich text editor in Flash. Once again it was XML to the rescue. WDDX packets can be passed from the server and imported into flash and sent back out to the server. With solid two-way communication established between the flash client and the server, my rich text editor could retrieve stylesheets and the saved article and make changes and save them back to the database.
Just yesterday, my boss used an RSS feed on one of the company websites to expand our dynamic content for our customers. Who knows what XML will do tomorrow. It certainly will be hard to predict. XML now solves problems that were never even dreamed of when the markup language was first invented.