Applications of XML

Enterprise Application Integration

(EAI) Using XML

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

is defined as the use of software and
computer systems architectural principles
to integrate a set of enterprise computer
applications.
Business Challenges
 The various approaches to Enterprise Application Integration
(EAI) have evolved from defining interfaces to utilizing a
variety of middleware technologies such as Message
Brokers, J2EE Application Servers, COM, and CORBA.
 The application integration almost always results in the

development of new business logic.

 EAI projects force change upon many application and

business areas and require a coordinated approach among

groups in an enterprise that used to deal with their
application and infrastructure needs in a mostly independent
way.
 XML as an Interface

 The disparate distributed applications need a

common platform to communicate with one
another. Because XML is not specific to any
proprietary platform, it can very well fit in
that. XML is not tied to a limited set of tags
defined by proprietary vendors. In other
words, it contains metadata. It allows each
specific industry to develop its own tag sets to
meet its unique needs.
 XML handles both forward and backward data

compatibilities
The following is the sample XML data for
customer details:
 
<customer cust_id="3790">
<cust_name>Steve</cust_name>
<address>
<block>7432 Silver</block>
<city>Columbia</city>
<zip>89131</zip>
<phone>2345678</phone>
<mobile>4320659</mobile>
<date>01/06/1999</date>
</address>
 Web Publishing
 XML is designed to publish documents
programmatically. A developer or a designer writes
stylesheets(Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style
sheet language used to describe the presentation
semantics (the look and formatting) of a document
written in a markup language)

 This is not unlike ASP( also known as Classic

ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-
side script-engine for dynamically-generated web
pages) or PHP(PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a
widely used, general-purpose scripting language that
 More importantly, the different products
implement different solutions, so they are
suitable for different types of projects.
For example, Cocoon is ideal for highly
dynamic sites, Vignette excels with very
large sites, and XM is for medium-sized
sites.
 E commerce
 XML promotes a message-oriented view of electronic
commerce that isolates business transactions
 from differences in software, hardware, system

architectures, and application programming

languages.
 Examples of business messages:
 purchase order from a buyer to a seller
 invoice from the seller back to the buyer
 request to make payment through a credit card
 authorization to use credit card
 status reports on success or failure of services
Web searching and automating Web
tasks
 By using XML, Web agents and robots (programs
that automate Web searches or other tasks) are more
efficient and produce more useful results.
Meta Data
 A key role of enterprise content- management products is to
describe business data accurately and consistently in meta data so
that it can be found with relative ease and speed and then acted
upon.
 The introduction of XML has provided a convenient notation for
organizing Web content. When using XML, applications need not
analyze how data is presented. That's because the intrinsic data
structure is described by means of meta data tools such as DTDs and
XML schema documents. Also, data transformations from one
context to another can be achieved easily by using declarative tools
such as XSLT.
 Therefore, bringing consistency to meta data and making it easier
for knowledge-workers to use is crucial. Software vendors are trying
to resolve these common problems by combining content-
management and taxonomy-creation capabilities in their products.