XML

In the past, communication protocols and document structures were based mostly on proprietary formats. Clients were tied to specific vendors for their IT infrastructure. The industry recognized that in order to jump into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm, an open standard was needed that would serve as the foundation of all communication forms. Therefore XML emerged as the lingua franca of the Internet.

XML (eXtensible Markup language) is an official standard by W3C, the same organization that controls the HTML standard which was crucial for the proliferation of the world wide web. XML shares the same concept with HTML (opening and closing tags) but offers much more flexibility and scalability since any organization can adapt XML to its needs.

XML files are text files that can be understood by both machines and humans. They are not dependent on any Operating System, Corporation or programming language and thus can be exploited for communication by different systems from different vendors (even legacy systems can be converted to use XML).

XML has gained a lot of support from major companies in the field (including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun) resulting in a large XML ecosystem comprising of tools, programming libraries, application servers and templates. Even governments have started to push for XML based technologies across all fields including (but not limited to) office documents (ODF).

XML has a bright future. More and more legacy document systems are converted in XML. New projects that have to co-operate across distributed networks have built-in support for XML. XML and its dialects are more pervasive than ever before.

You can consult the wikipedia entry on XML for additional information.

Agilis has quickly embraced the XML initiative across it software tool chain. Recognizing the power of XML Agilis is understanding the needs for open standards and effortless communication among different parties, resulting in the use of XML as a storage and communication medium in its software solutions.