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Page Three: XML has the potential to revolutionise data exchange but the myriad standards and specifications surrounding the meta-language could seriously discourage users in the short-term The overall advice seems to be that XML should be seen as complementary to EDI rather than a replacement. "Companies can work within their industries to promote the adoption of XML standards that would extend their existing EDI infrastructures, and these hybrid systems can then be used to exchange more data with external partners," the report stated. Gartner's Abrams agrees that comparing EDI with XML is a non-starter. "They are apples and oranges. You can take EDI right now and incorporate XML objects into it -- by wrapping the messages in Soap you have very basic Web services that can interact with other applications. Some organisations are doing this right now." He says EDI is limited at the moment as different industries and countries use different specifications that are not interchangeable. But by integrating XML into their EDI processes, companies can make EDI more interchangeable, without having to replace legacy systems completely. "It's going to be the work of the EDI community through XML to make these processes more interchangeable in real time with more information resources," said Abrams. There is a well-documented tendency in the industry to vastly overestimate the short-term potential of a technology, but vastly underestimate the long-term impact. XML is no different, according to Abrams. "If you have two different ERP applications that you want to share with business partners, you can definitely use Soap-based XML right now to start sharing data. But if you have a project with 90 trading partners and 9,000 customers, and you think you are going to press a button and have a whole new architecture for exchanging information after two months' worth of development, you’re being completely unrealistic." Despite the relative immaturity of XML, the fragmentation of standards and the technical complexity, Abrams maintains that the meta-language is developing extremely well and users should not be put off. Indeed, it's only through companies implementing XML-based projects that the language will mature, and as expertise increases there will be a corresponding drop in costs. "For something that was on the horizon in 1997, to go as far as it has in five or six years it has been doing incredible well. But we definitely have a way of overestimating things in the short term and under estimating in the long run. It may take the rest of the decade. You can’t expect something to take six years," he said.
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Talkback
Nothing new here. When was this article written? This article could easily be a reprint from a couple of years ago.
I agree...the concept of XML started of with the idea that it is visually easier to read and expandable from a programmatic manner. Along with the schemas, it was supposed to be easier for everyone to interpret and present the data systematically.
However, reality is that the standards for some XMLs specify so many fields that ultimately the end users have to chose which fields work for them and again define how they are going to interpret each field regardless of what the standards specify. This is just like transferring data the old way - binary or even CSV.
Does anyone actually listen to the Gartner Group or it's analysts?
The analyst in this case says that anyone can develop an XML standard and that in his view
this can be a real problem.
That's the whole point.
Anyone can define how they want their data to be organized and define a schema to clarify what rules the data must follow. The most important thing though is that these various rulesets can be easily identified by the use of namespaces.
Namepsaces combined with schemas make any concern about different standards mostly irrelevant.
If every company in an industry defines their own schema/namespace then it may take some time for them all to come to some agreement.
Fortunately, what is more likely to happen is that the first few to bring a solution into play will allow the remaining players to compare the merits and perhaps agree on one that best meets their needs.
Ultimately, this will weed out the less useful schemas and allow the most valued one to dominate.
XML is neither complex or new -- perhaps to someone that doesn't work with data on a regular basis, but such people should not be the standard by which technology is judged. SGML has been around for 25+ years, and XML is little different. We have finally moved to a point where there are platforms available to structure data in a way that can be filtered and interpreted by interchange modules and passed to business partners--all I see in this article are complaints that it doesn't happen instantaneously and effortlessly. Listen, if that's what you're looking for, then there should only be one software company and the government (perhaps the United Nations) should set data structure in stone with their own standards...if the complete nonsense of such a suggestion isn't obvious, you are in big trouble my friend.
The landscape is changing making it easier for the average person to do XML.
The answer is in templates and patterns that
fit common re-usable models.
The new VisualScript product from Smartdraw fits this bill, as does technologies like the CAM templating approach from the OASIS CAM team, and of course Microsoft is pinning its hopes on InfoDocs
Crossing the gap between the technical world of the XML saavy to the real world of end users is the key. HTML did this - now XML needs to find its way.