XML and Distributed Computing Architectures

by Frank P. Coyle

In just a few short years, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a simple data description language, has significantly changed how we think about data and communicate across the Internet. Content providers are looking to XML as a flexible data storage medium for delivering specialized content to browsers and handheld wireless computing devices. A look at the major players in the enterprise arena shows the pervasive influence of XML on distributed computing. Microsoft has adopted XML as the basis for its .NET initiative, IBM and Sun are solidly behind the notion of XML-based Web services, and almost all database vendors have integrated XML into their relational database offerings.