XML Integration Platforms
Anatomy of an XML Server
By Bob Bickel
The XML server is emerging as an important integration platform for developing
applications that create/send and receive/process XML. This article will look
at the design of an XML server and how it simplifies the task of writing XML
applications.
First, let's distinguish XML servers from something most of us are already
familiar with -- Web servers. A Web server responds to user requests via HTTP
and delivers HTML documents; it can also manage the interactions between a user
and a back-end application via CGI or other application programming interfaces.
An XML server is similar to a Web server in that you could use a browser to
retrieve an XML document from it. But there are two things that make an XML
server different: First, it provides a standard application interface for processing
XML-based information and second, it provides a variety of communication alternatives
for passing the XML documents to and from the XML server. An XML server, which
can receive, interpret, and generate XML documents, is really designed to communicate
with other applications or other servers, not with users. The XML server can
be used to automate the interchange of information between different applications,
or between different organizations. For instance, a purchasing application might
send information in a standard XML format to another application, which could
use it to update a product database.
