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Blowing XML Bubbles
By Michael Floyd
At one time or another, everyone from marketing professors to analyst companies has proposed various models to describe the cycle of high-flying technologies. Most picture a seed point followed by a phase of tremendous hyping, typically followed by a period of depression usually caused by the overhyping.
Such a model prompted me to predict, on the editorial page of the June 1996 issue of this publication, a cooling period for the Web. Well, so much for forecasting. In fact, I've applied this model to technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI), object-oriented programming, and Java. The point of such an exercise is really to determine if a technology is just the "tech de jour" or whether it will be around long enough to have a lasting impact on the industry. Unfortunately, these models more often than not fail miserably in making such predictions.
So I'd like to propose something I call Floyd's Bubble. It works much like blowing a soap bubble. You start with a technology, and huff and puff until you get a sizable bubble. Soon, others notice your bubble, and join in the huff and puff. You lose ownership of the bubble—perhaps retaining 20 percent of its equity if you're lucky—but the bubble grows far bigger than any bubble you could have blown on your own. Eventually, your bubble reaches its elastic limit and it pops. Whatever is left is the true value of your bubble. It's this true value that determines whether a technology will succeed or whether everyone will walk over to the next bubble wand.
In the case of XML, I was curious to see what we'll be left with when the bubble pops. To get some answers, I posed a series of questions to some of the chief bubble blowers in the XML community: Just exactly where is XML as a technology? What markets are forming? How is it being used? What are its limitations? When are companies throwing XML at a problem and, more importantly, when are they not? What follows is a transcript of the interviews, most of which were conducted through email. I hope the answers will help you determine what's of real value and how you can use this in planning your own business strategy.
One Big Bubble or Many Tiny Bubbles?
In XML's early days, the XML community was one not-so-big, but quite happy family. In 1996, XML was seen simply as a data representation language. Now the question arises: Has the XML bubble split into several smaller bubbles? Specifically, I asked what lines each vendor saw being drawn, and how it would characterize those markets. Responses fell into two categories: Those that saw distinct uses of XML, and those that viewed XML as a technology without any distinct communities.
Our first bubble blower is Reid Conrad, the president and CEO of Extensibility, which produces XML Authority, a DTD and schema authoring tool. (See " Online Resources" for URLs.) "We encounter two broad areas of XML implementation at this time," Conrad says. "The first is the use of XML as a framework for Internet-based information interchange. The two leading applications for this group are Web-enabled application integration and a new generation of e-commerce solutions."
The second use of XML that Conrad sees is content management and publishing. "With more applications producing XML-enriched content, we expect this application for XML [to be] reaching ubiquity. Imagine all major applications providing XML encoding and interface facilities for their content." Bob Bickel, senior vice president of products at Bluestone, sees similar lines being drawn. Bickel has overall responsibility for the software product business at Bluestone Software, including oversight of product strategy, corporate relationships, and development.
"Bluestone sees XML dividing into two primary camps," Bickel says. "The first is the 'integration' camp, which will use XML as a means of business-to-business communication for purposes of data interchange. In this case, XML must be capable of supporting multiple communication protocols, including HTTP, SSL, FTP, email, Java Messaging Service (JMS), MQSeries, as well as scheduling. Additionally, we see Java as the platform to process XML, and dynamic XML integration servers, like Bluestone's XML Suite, as the best way to implement this processing.
"The second camp for XML represents data publishing," Bickel continues. "An increasingly attractive concept is to use XML and XSL to customize content delivery, leveraging the XML and XSL server to deliver properly formatted content to any device throughout the enterprise. The XSL transformation performed by the server applies the appropriate style sheet and formats the content for any given device—anything from a PC browser to a Palm device. As a result, companies can standardize on XML even though not all of their devices yet support XML."
Coco Jaenicke takes a different tack. Jaenicke is the XML evangelist and product marketing manager for eXcelon, an XML application development environment for building and deploying e-business applications. While she agrees that there may be distinct uses for XML, Jaenicke believes that "these camps will merge and soon become indistinguishable. As e-business transforms the IT department, these once isolated functions are becoming tighter and tighterŠOne of the beauties of XML is that merging these tasks can be done in a standard and extensible way."
Another perspective comes from Marie Wieck, the Director of Technology for the IBM Network Computing Software Division. Wieck is responsible for deploying new technologies for IBM, and she's currently focused on coordinating IBM's strategic XML efforts.
"In general, I don't see it as splitting or fracturing across these various spaces. I think you'll see activities regardless of where they're coming from," Wieck says. "I think of it more and more as this new technology and people are applying it wherever they [need] a structured data standard where they're going to exchange the information or want to repurpose the information for multiple forms. Because it's extensible, to me, that's the most powerful aspect—that you can define your own vocabulary for the data that is of interest to you. And as a result you have a kind of thousand flowers blooming effect going on.
Everybody is very interested in it, is developing industry standards and general purpose cross-business schema definitions, DTDs, and markup languages using XML. And through the publicity about it and the coordinated efforts of xml.org, I think you'll see more and more consolidation of these spaces over time."
To XML, or Not to XML
Without a doubt, there's been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding XML. With their understanding of XML's potential, I asked our industry experts when you should—and shouldn't—consider XML in a solution. While the reasons for using it came freely, situations where XML is not reasonable were harder to come by. Here are their responses:
Conrad: Complementary to most development environments, it is easy to realize the hype. XML is being used to bridge heterogeneous technologies. Its capacity to bridge diversity should deliver on the hype. Clearly XML is a great fit for information interchange solutions and Web-based applications. Its adaptability for all types of information flow "to" (machine to browser) or "through" (machine to machine) the Internet is fantastic. Content repurposing is driving organizations to work more effectively together. Over time, the repurposing of context will drive more adaptive applications. [But] XML's verbose nature reduces its effectiveness for information persistence. It will take time for XML flows to be streamlined.
Bickel: XML must be considered for any comprehensive business-to-business solution. XML can also be considered to be a new way to deliver dynamic content on Web sites by leveraging an XML interface between JSPs (Java Server Pages) and JavaBeans.
Jaenicke: XML provides a solid, yet flexible framework to build any B2B application. Because XML works seamlessly with HTML, the language of the Web, XML provides a familiar platform-independent development environment for Web developers. XML...is the perfect tool for linking disparate systems or working in rich content environments where semistructured data is prevalent. Likewise, developing XML-based applications to leverage strictly structured data in a closed environment would not provide significant advantages. Extensibility is the key advantage of XML; if you're not taking advantage of that, you're missing the point.
Limitations of the Technology
As a follow-on, I noted that XML is good at some things, and not good at others (such as binary data). So I asked each member what limitations they see with XML and how their companies are addressing them.
Conrad: XML may be too flexible for its own good. We see many users overwhelmed with the notion of creating their own content and e-business vocabularies. The fact is, many organizations already have a foundation to get started. Core components for an XML vocabulary reside in existing applications. We provide a host of services that let users convert and enhance their application metadata to XML schemas. XML schemas provide the grammars for the vocabularies and give context to XML-encoded content. Our users start with schemas to give structure to their XML applications and facilitate e-business rules between trading partners.
Bickel: As XML usage has grown, so has the proliferation of DTDs and schemas, which is both good and bad for XML. On the negative side, literally thousands of applications of XML and a complementary number of DTDs will be representing nearly every industry organization. To help companies adapt and manage this overwhelming proliferation of new DTD and schema information, we've incorporated unique DTD and schema transformation capabilities into our Bluestone XML Suite, which comprises Bluestone Visual-XML and Bluestone XML-Server.
Jaenicke: Certainly, there are trade-offs associated with adapting to most new technologies. For instance, you have to determine if the ability to distinguish between data and display in your Web application justifies the larger files these additional (description) tags produce. I believe it will. Further, as storage costs continue to fall and the development of binary XML continues to progress, I believe that the benefits of XML still far outweigh these issues. Also, due in part to the focus on Y2K preparedness in 1999, there has been a shortage of quality development tools available for XML. That clearly has been a limitation to the creative applications developed to help propel XML into the mainstream. Although not primarily known as a tools company, for this reason, eXcelon Corporation provides a robust set of development tools in eXcelon to ensure our customers are able to easily construct powerful applications right out of the box.
Wieck: Quite frankly, I was wrestling with that question. I haven't seen drawbacks in terms of "can't work here." But I think some people are taking a purist perspective around XML. If you can define it in XML, it's about data, so you can do anything. You can make a programming language out of it. You can extend it to the extreme. I think in general one of the areas that we're very interested in is the whole definition for XML schema, and (you actually reported on this) adding the data typing capabilities into the specification and making [it] into an XML form that's going to simplify some of the aspects of actual application-to-application integration. Because you now have the constructs that a programming environment tends to expect, in addition to having it defined in a well-structured form from a data-isolation perspective. Application integration where data typing is required [is an example of where] we would recommend waiting a little bit, but I can't say that is precluding people from doing useful transaction-based work or even application integration work.
XML at Work
Finally, to see how others are using XML, I asked each of our experts what innovative uses of XML they've seen.
Conrad: We find users pushing XML deeper into existing applications. The first stage of XML-based Web solutions used XML as a veneer for content exchange. Moving forward, we're beginning to see the next generation of XML applications, which integrate more tightly with the underlying applications themselves. XML's flexibility will breathe new life into existing application environments.
Bickel: One nice use of XML is a fantastic realtime, wireless XML application that we demonstrated at the Giga Emerging Technology Scene conference. Titled "Beyond the Browser—Bluestone Extends Total-e-Business to Wireless Devices," the demo described below is underpinned by XML.
A Bluestone representative went into the Giga conference audience and—using the ruggedized Symbol SPT 1740 RF PalmPilot—scanned the bar-coded name tag of a randomly selected attendee and entered the attendee's cell phone number. Using Bluestone's ConXML application software, the scanned data was immediately converted to XML and uplinked via wireless protocols to a Symbol Spectrum24 Wireless LAN receiver connected to the Total-e-Business server. Total-e-Business software, including the Sapphire/Web Application Server and XML Suite Integration Server, automatically personalized the data and displayed the attendee's name on a Web page. At the same time, the name was sent to a separate room (simulating an offsite manufacturing facility), where it was custom printed onto a T-shirt. Simultaneously, the Total-e-Business software sent an email to an onstage Qualcomm PDQ Smart Phone, which autodialed the cell phone...with notification of the T-shirt's completion.
This same application can be applied to any number of business enterprise applications, where connectivity and realtime data exchange is critical, including medical, retail, supply chain management, automated inventory, and manufacturing, to name just a few. (By the way we won first prize for the demo in all four judging categories.)
Jaenicke: There are so many, it's harder to say what isn't innovative! I believe XML development is still in its infancy. As new tools are developed, I can see exciting applications being built in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), collaborative commerce, and knowledge management, taking them to new heights of functionality. We've seen several applications that help supply-chain management tremendously. XML is going to be the liberating technology that opens up the EDI supply chain to dynamic collaboration, providing new opportunities for business partnerships built on the existing EDI infrastructure. As the technology develops, large EDI host corporations will be able to understand any document created in XML. Smaller, non-EDI suppliers, will then be able to participate in RFQ's (Request for Quotation) that they had not been able to in the past (since they could not send/receive data in the EDI format). Ideally, this will increase competition between suppliers, lowering the manufacturer costs, and provide lower prices for consumers.
Conclusion
When does the bubble pop, and when do we see what of value is left behind? That moment usually happens when you push aside the hype and try to do something real with the technology. Then you decide if the benefits are worth the effort. I believe that's taking place now. I also believe that companies are finding immediate benefits in terms of heterogeneous data exchange. But the real carrot is the ability to repurpose and exchange today's data using formats and devices that have yet to be devised.
Michael is the publisher of LifestylesSantaCruz.com and Web Techniques' editor at large. Reach him at mfloyd@lifestylesSantaCruz.com.
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