Article Archive

DOM for Web Services, Part 2
This article shows how to use Microsoft's Document Object Model (DOM) implementation to create a user interface for a web service from a WSDL file, with examples both in Internet Explorer and using ASP.NET. It provides a gentle introduction to the programmatic use of the DOM. [Nov 11, 2003]

Typeless Schemas and Services
Strange as it may seem, top thinkers in web services are moving away from strongly typed models of data into a more document-centric service oriented model. Rich Salz charts this change in thinking. [Sep 2, 2003]

Using Python, Jython, and Lucene to Search Outlook Email
Ever had trouble finding a particular email? So did Jon Udell, so he put together Python, Jython and Lucene in order to create a local web service that indexed his Microsoft Outlook mail store. [May 13, 2003]

[More Articles on .NET]

All Aboard AJAX, HTML Canvas, and the Supertrain
Dave Hoover shows us how to use AJAX, Ruby, and the new HTML canvas element to add simple animation and interactivity to web apps. [Jan 18, 2006]

JSON and the Dynamic Script Tag: Easy, XML-less Web Services for JavaScript
Jason Levitt returns with a piece explaining how to use AJAX and JSON to interact with web services from JavaScript in a seamless, cross-domain, cross-browser fashion. [Dec 21, 2005]

Tuning AJAX
AJAX is all the rage and it's being used for non-trivial applications. But do you know what's fast and what's slow in AJAX? Get ready to tune your AJAX apps. [Nov 30, 2005]

Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful
Jason Levitt shows us how to work around XmlHttpRequest restrictions in order to get more joy from third-party web services. [Nov 9, 2005]

[More Articles on Ajax]

Scripting Flickr with Python and REST
In his latest Agile Web column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to use Python to interact with Flickr as a lightweight web service. [Jan 25, 2006]

Putting RSS to Work: Immediate Action Feeds
Mark Woodman shows us how to enhance the usability of RSS and Atom syndication channels with an idea he calls Immediate Action Feeds. [Dec 14, 2005]

Analyzing the Web
In his latest XML Tourist column John E. Simpson asks whether XML has a role to play in reporting website traffic statistics. He finds two applications that use XML to analyze website traffic. [Jul 27, 2005]

Introducing NetKernel
Pete Rodgers introduces NetKernel, a novel software framework for building Web services and applications. [Apr 27, 2005]

[More Articles on Applications]

Semantic Wikis and Disaster Relief Operations
Dr. Soenke Ziesche describes how to use semantic wikis to provide a kind of queryable database of documents to support disaster response and humanitarian efforts at the United Nations. [Dec 13, 2006]

Forming Consensus
In his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko outlines a plan for combining the XForms and Web Forms 2.0 communities. [May 11, 2005]

XQuery's Niche
XQuery has been much hyped, but is it sufficiently different from XSLT to be successful? Edd Dumbill follows a debate looking for XQuery's niche.  [Dec 29, 2004]

The Cost of XML
The apparent overhead of using XML is once more in the spotlight, as is the financial overhead of using eBay's web services. Edd Dumbill reports. [Dec 15, 2004]

[More Articles on Community]

Mozilla and Opera Renew the Browser Battle
Mozilla and Opera have joined together to drive forward browser standards, in an effort to head off the threat from Microsoft's .NET plans -- and route around a lagging W3C. [Jun 16, 2004]

Little Back Corners
In this month's XML Q&A column John E. Simpson examines some of the back corners of XPath processor namespace handling. [Feb 25, 2004]

Making Web Services Work at Amazon
Jeff Barr, Amazon's web services evangelist, presented Tuesday at XML 2003, explaining the decisions involved in making Amazon's puiblic web services strategy a success. [Dec 9, 2003]

XForms and Microsoft InfoPath
Micah Dubinko, author of XForms Essentials, compares W3C XForms and Microsoft InfoPath, the data gathering technology shipping with Microsoft Office 2003. [Oct 29, 2003]

[More Articles on Companies]

The ebXML Messaging Service
The ebXML Messaging Service specification (ebMS) extends the SOAP specification to provide the security and reliability features required by many production enterprise and e-business applications.  [Mar 18, 2003]

ebXML: It Ain't Over 'til it's Over
The final meeting of the Electronic Business XML initiative in Vienna marked the 18-month deadline set for the project, yet there is still plenty left to do. [May 16, 2001]

ebXML Ropes in SOAP
Our report on the latest happenings in ebXML covers their adoption of SOAP, and takes stock as ebXML nears the end of its project. [Apr 4, 2001]

ebXML: Assembling the Rubik's Cube (part 2)
 [Aug 16, 2000]

[More Articles on ebXML]

How eBay Uses Metadata to Enhance Its Web Services
Alan Lewis, an eBay developer, explains how the auction giant uses metadata to enhance the documentation of its complex e-commerce web services. [Sep 28, 2005]

Tracking Packages with RSS
Using XSLT and UPS's Web services, Yakov Shafranovich builds a package tracking app with RSS. [Mar 16, 2005]

The Cost of XML
The apparent overhead of using XML is once more in the spotlight, as is the financial overhead of using eBay's web services. Edd Dumbill reports. [Dec 15, 2004]

Trust Networks in a Web Services World
How do interconnecting web services know who to trust? We examine the role of Security Token Services in mediating trust netweem services. [May 26, 2004]

[More Articles on Ecommerce]

Introducing E4X
Kurt Cagle introduces us to E4X, an XML library for JavaScript, and argues that XML and JSON are both indispensable parts of the web app developer's toolkit. [Nov 30, 2007]

jQuery and XML
Uche Ogbuji returns with a new Agile Web column to explain how to use jQuery to process XML in JavaScript web applications. [Oct 15, 2007]

Extended XQuery for SOA
Web service orchestration is an important part of web services and service oriented architecture. Gimzewski and Fancellu argue that XQuery is especially well-suited as an implementation language for service orchestrator components. [Sep 14, 2007]

Introducing OpenSearch
Uche Ogbuji's Agile Web column returns with an introduction to OpenSearch, an Atom-friendly format for describing and discovering search engines and query endpoints on the Web in a RESTful way. [Jul 24, 2007]

[More Articles on Instruction]

Schema Binding for Java Web Services
Thanks to the use of W3C XML Schema in WSDL descriptions, data binding can be used to implement web services in Java. We examine some implementation strategies. [May 26, 2004]

Implementing XML Encryption in Java
In the third of his series on Web Services Security for Java, Bilal Siddiqui joins together the pieces and adds XML encryption support to his WSS4J project. [Apr 21, 2004]

Using XSS4J for XML Encryption
In the second part of his series on implementing web services security, Bilal Siddiqui introduces IBM alphaWorks' XML Security Suite for Java. [Nov 25, 2003]

Web Services Security for Java
This first article in a new column by Bilal Siddiqui embarks upon deploying web services security. Siddiqui introduces the use cases for a Java web service security API, and begins its implementation. [Oct 28, 2003]

[More Articles on Java]

Linkin' Park
One of the original trinity of XML specs, XML linking has largely failed. Can, and should, we fix it? [Oct 27, 2004]

The Atom Link Model
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive Into XML column he explains the Atom linking model, which is based on the familiar HTML linking model but is more expressive and more flexible. [Jun 16, 2004]

Prototyping One-to-many Links with XSLT
In his latest Transforming XML adventure, Bob DuCharme explains how to use XSLT to experiment with one-to-many hypertext links. [Mar 5, 2003]

The Return of XML Hypertext
Kendall Clark reports on the creation of a new mailing list focused on the use of XML for hypertext. [Jan 22, 2003]

[More Articles on Linking]

Under the Hood: Oracle Berkeley DB XML
XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.  [May 7, 2008]

What Is RDF
Joshua Tauberer updates the classic XML.com article "What Is RDF" by rewriting it from scratch. Tauberer claims that RDF is more relevant than ever in the world of Web 2.0. [Jul 26, 2006]

Microformats in Context
Uche Ogbuji takes a careful look at microformats and concludes that while, in practice, they suffer from serious non-trivial problems, the basic idea offers an interesting basis upon which to build interesting data formats, particularly in conjunction with complementary technologies. [Apr 26, 2006]

RSS Feeds for FTP Servers
Mark Woodman returns with another interesting RSS application: he describes a PHP library for creating RSS feeds for FTP sites. Old-school FTP meets new-school RSS! [Mar 22, 2006]

[More Articles on Metadata]

Music and Metadata
Chris Mitchell offers an interesting take on music and the Semantic Web, using metadata to find a club with the right style of music. [Nov 22, 2006]

Big Lists in Small Spaces
After a long hiatus, our Sacré SVG columnist, Fabio Arciniegas, returns with a technique for displaying large lists or trees of information in small spaces. [May 4, 2005]

Speech Synthesis Markup Language: An Introduction
Peter Mikhalenko introduces SSML, an XML vocabulary for creating speech-synthesis capable web applications. [Oct 20, 2004]

SVG At the Movies
Antoine Quint returns with a new column about SVG -- this time he focuses on the interesting new features for video integration in SVG 1.2. [Oct 13, 2004]

[More Articles on Multimedia]

Scripting Flickr with Python and REST
In his latest Agile Web column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to use Python to interact with Flickr as a lightweight web service. [Jan 25, 2006]

Screenscraping the Senate
In Paul Ford's first Hacking Congress column, he shows us how to turn information on the U.S. Senate site into RDF. [Sep 1, 2004]

Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP
Find out how to create XML-RPC, SOAP and REST web services using PHP, the most popular scripting language for web applications. [Mar 24, 2004]

Building a Web Services Container in Python
In Rich Salz's latest column he continues his implementation of XKMS by assembling a web services container server out of existing Python parts. [Jan 20, 2004]

[More Articles on Open Source]

XQuery, the Server Language
Kurt Cagle offers an interesting perspective on the future utility of XQuery as a server-side development language. [Jun 6, 2007]

Which XML Technologies Are Beautiful?
Michael Day asks an interesting question: which XML technologies are beautiful and why? He answers with some candidates. Which XML technologies do you think are most beautiful? [Apr 18, 2007]

The Future of XSLT 2.0
Kurt Cagle provides some compelling arguments for the importance of XSLT 2.0 in XML applications as we move forward. [Mar 21, 2007]

Is XML 2.0 Under Development?
In Micah Dubinko's return to the XML Annoyances banner, he speculates as to whether the W3C is already considering whether to start work on XML 2.0. Read this piece and decide for yourself. [Jan 10, 2007]

[More Articles on Perspectives]

Under the Hood: Oracle Berkeley DB XML
XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.  [May 7, 2008]

XForms Thick Clients
Jack Cox explains an approach to building XForms client applications that work in a disconnected environment. [Oct 19, 2007]

XForms, XML Schema, and ROX
Kurt Cagle describes ROX Server, a RESTful system for building XForms from an XML Schema and some other bits. [Aug 17, 2007]

XQuery, libferris, and Virtual Filesystems
Ben Martin returns with another look at his fascinating system, libferris, which turns everything into a filesystem, that is, a hierarchical data store. This time Ben shows us how to use XQuery with libferris as a kind of universal data access language. Good stuff! [Jul 27, 2007]

[More Articles on Programming]

Parsing Microformats
Brian Suda explains how to handle hCard, the vCard microformat embedded in HTML. [Sep 4, 2007]

Getting Productive with XMLMind
In the area of technical publishing, there are still challenges to be faced when creating large, complex documents using XML. This week Jim Elliott and Marc Loy provide an excellent introduction to XMLMind, an XML editing environment optimized for complex technical documents. [Jun 21, 2007]

XInclude Processing in XSLT
Continuing our mini-series on XSLT 2.0, Erik Wilde describes XIPr, an XInclude Processor implemented as a single XSLT 2.0 stylesheet, for using in document inclusion processing tasks. [Mar 28, 2007]

What Does XML Smell Like?
Michael Day presents some heuristics for sniffing out the difference between arbitrary XML and HTML documents on the Web. [Feb 28, 2007]

[More Articles on Publishing]

A New Identity for Web Services
Jason Levitt describes the newly burgeoning field of web authentication APIs, including Yahoo's BBAuth and Google's AuthSub. [Jun 13, 2007]

Implementing XML Encryption in Java
In the third of his series on Web Services Security for Java, Bilal Siddiqui joins together the pieces and adds XML encryption support to his WSS4J project. [Apr 21, 2004]

Atom Authentication
Mark Pilgrim explains why the Atom developers are using a new kind of authentication scheme, and he explains why it's necessary. [Dec 17, 2003]

Building a Security Infrastructure
In his latest column Rich Salz continues with the implementation of an XKMS web service; in this installment he focuses on the public key infrastructure. [Dec 9, 2003]

[More Articles on Security]

Introducing RDFa, Part Two
In this second part of a two-part series, Bob DuCharme concludes his introduction of RDFa--a new, XHTML-friendly standard syntax for RDF metadata that allows you to embed RDF metadata into the Web in a novel way. [Apr 4, 2007]

Introducing WSGI: Python's Secret Web Weapon, Part Two
In Part Two, James Gardner completes his introduction of WSGI, the new Python standard for building reusable web-framework components. [Oct 4, 2006]

Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol
Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column brings us up to date with Atom Publishing Protocol. Fast on the heels of the Atom Syndication Format becoming an internet standard, it's time to see where the APP stands. [Dec 7, 2005]

Google Sitemaps
Uche Ogbuji's new XML.com column, "Agile Web," explores the intersection of agile programming languages and Web 2.0. In this first installment he examines Google's Sitemaps schema, as well as Python and XSLT code to generate site maps. [Oct 26, 2005]

[More Articles on Specifications]

Automating Stylesheet Creation
Bob DuCharme shows how an XSLT stylesheet can read simplified XML-conversion instructions and create a new, working XSLT stylesheet from those instructions.  [Sep 7, 2005]

Appreciating Libxslt
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme introduces libxslt, a very performant and feature-rich XSLT processor with roots in the GNOME world. [Aug 3, 2005]

Push, Pull, Next!
Bob DuCharme compares the push and pull styles of XSLT stylesheet architectures and looks at two new XSLT 2.0 instructions that aid push-style development. [Jul 6, 2005]

Seeking Equality
Bob DuCharme looks at how XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 let you evaluate whether two elements are equal. [Jun 8, 2005]

[More Articles on Style]

Under the Hood: Oracle Berkeley DB XML
XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.  [May 7, 2008]

XML Parser Benchmarks: Part 1
In the golden days, XML parser performance was a perpetually hot topic. And today it's still worth knowing which modern parsers offer the best performance. In this first of a two-part series, event-based parsers are compared; in the next part, object parsers are compared. [May 10, 2007]

XSLT as Pretty Printer
Hew Wolff discusses some of the issues surrounding an XSLT style sheet that will pretty print arbitrary XML and includes the style sheet itself. [Nov 29, 2006]

Moving to OpenOffice: Batch Converting Legacy Documents
Bob DuCharme presents a practical solution to a real problem. You want to move from MS Office to OpenOffice, but you've got mountains of legacy documents to convert. Bob gives a clever batch conversion solution to this common problem. [Jan 11, 2006]

[More Articles on Tools]

Directory Trees to Document Trees
In this month's XML Tourist, John E. Simpsons discusses TreeSpace, a hard disk space analysis tool that uses XML to represent data portably. [Mar 30, 2005]

The Silent Soundtrack
In this installation of XML Tourist, John E. Simpson presents an overview of the types of sound-to-text captioning available. Pinpointing closed captioning as the most suitable for use with computerized multimedia, he then explains how XML-based solutions address synchronization issues. [Feb 2, 2005]

Mapping and Markup, Part 2
In the final part of his XML Tourist column's exploration of GML, John E. Simpson introduces us to the component schema parts as well as to some GML software. [Dec 29, 2004]

News Standards: A Rising Tide of Commoditization
How can news providers persuade customers to accept new standard formats? Does RSS threaten or present opportunity to the news industry. Jo Rabin comments on the state of standards in the news industry. [May 5, 2004]

[More Articles on Vertical Industries]

A Smoother Change to Version 2.0
Marc de Graauw follows up David Orchard's recent piece about versioning XML vocabularies with a piece about the Capability Compatibility Design Pattern, including code for achieving forward and backward compatibility between XML vocabulary revisions. [Apr 11, 2007]

Google Sitemaps
Uche Ogbuji's new XML.com column, "Agile Web," explores the intersection of agile programming languages and Web 2.0. In this first installment he examines Google's Sitemaps schema, as well as Python and XSLT code to generate site maps. [Oct 26, 2005]

Introducing SKOS
Peter Mikhalenko introduces SKOS, a W3C standard for using RDF to represent thesauri, taxonomies, and other information space structures. [Jun 22, 2005]

Canadian Broadcasting in XML
In this month's XML Tourist, John E. Simpson explores industry regulators' use of XML to exchange information about the Canadian broadcast spectrum. [May 25, 2005]

[More Articles on Vocabularies]