DeltaXML Newsletter - September 2003

Welcome to the September edition of our newsletter. In this edition we introduce you to our new evaluation process, have a look at using XML change control in Content Management and discuss using XML pipelines for configuration.

When you need to build solutions to handle changes in XML, look to DeltaXML as the market leader in this field. Free evaluation downloads are available at our web site http://www.deltaxml.com/

- The DeltaXML Team.

Contents
In this newsletter:

Recent DeltaXML customers
DeltaXML Evaluation Roadmap released
Content Management Systems and XML change control
Technical Corner: Using DeltaXML Pipelines for Configuration
Diary Dates

Customer Focus: Recent DeltaXML Customers

Our new customers include:

Jouve Aviation (USA) - http://www.jouve.com/
American Management Systems (USA) - http://www.ams.com/
Société Générale (France) - http://www.socgen.com/en/
viaMEDICI (Germany) - http://www.viamedici.com/

DeltaXML is providing the core engine for content management data comparison, technical document updates and synchronization of configuration file updates.

[Read more...]

DeltaXML Evaluation Roadmap Released

This month we’ve opened our new Evaluation Roadmap, an online resource to help you understand how DeltaXML can deliver the right technology for your XML change control problems. The Roadmap contains downloads, online evaluations and all the information you need to understand what DeltaXMLcan offer and how it can be tailored to your needs.

Online evaluation of our core XML change control technology - try it with your own data
Case studies and use cases - what do current customers think and how are they using DeltaXML?
Downloads - evaluation versions of the DeltaXML API
API Tutorials, FAQs and technical papers
...and a whole host of other resources to understand the DeltaXML difference.

The Evaluation Roadmap is a new initiative and we're very interested in your feedback. Please let us know what you think and if there's something else you'd like to see there, let us know.

Weblink: http://www.deltaxml.com/evaluate/

XML Change Control and Content Management

DeltaXML brings efficiencies in identification and processing of changing data in your content management system. We are providing a compelling market advantage to the CMS vendors currently embedding DeltaXML, since we hold the patent on the only comprehensive strategy available for achieving robust change control. With DeltaXML technology you can:

Identify, process and control changes in all XML files stored in your CMS (XHTML or raw XML, PDF documents stored as XML-FO or graphics files stored as SVG, for example)
Control and manage changes to your XML-based document assembly and publishing
Audit all change trails
Provide roll-forward and roll-back for any XML in your CMS
Allow automated post-processing of differences and "patching" between versions
Synchronize multiple concurrent edits.

Please ask if you'd like to learn more about our support for CM tools, or get in touch and arrange to meet us at the Enterprise Content Management 2003 show , Olympia, London, 7 - 9 October 2003. More...

Technical Corner: DeltaXML Pipelines for Configuration

Best practice dictates Separation of Concerns between content and logic processing. When using DeltaXML configuration technologies such as Keyed and Orderless comparisons markup must be added to input files, this is best achieved not by polluting the input documents with DeltaXML specifics but by using pipelining.
For example, the "<choice>" elements of your document have orderless children (a familiar problem!) and you either do not want or are unable to modify the input documents themselves. By building an XML pipeline, you

read the documents into the pipeline
add a new attribute - deltaxml:ordered="false" - to each <choice> element as it passes through
process the documents through the DeltaXML engine
remove any extraneous markup from the result.

This can be accomplished by building a JAXP pipeline and invoking the DeltaXML comparator to pull data from the input files, through any number of intermediate filters, into the engine, and to push the output through any number of output filters to produce the final result. Sample code included with our evaluation API shows how to do this with very simple XSLT transforms, JAXP also allows for non-XSLT filters if required.

Clearly this mechanism can be used to build sophisticated processing chains - for example, we have customers using these techniques to flag certain elements as "ignorable" and normalize whitespace, and to generate HTML regression test reports from the output. We have skimmed the surface of this subject, for further study see the online resources; we also have sample filters that you can adapt as required, please ask for details.

Weblinks:
Configuring DeltaXML with XSL Filters: http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/deltaxml-xsl-filters.pdf
Key-Assisted Comparisons: http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/deltaxml-keys.pdf
If you prefer detailed worked examples, try
Using XSL to Add DeltaXML Keys: http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/using-xsl-to-add-keys.pdf

Diary Dates

7 - 9 October 2003 : Enterprise Content Management 2003, Olympia, London - get in touch to meet us at the Corel stand for a demonstration showing how Corel XMetaL® and DeltaXML can be integrated.
11 December 2003 : XML 2003, Philadelphia (5 - 12 Dec) - we'll be presenting a paper in the Core Technologies track which discusses a new DeltaXML development, "unified deltas". Titled "Russian Dolls and XML: Designing Multi-version XML documents", this paper will demonstrate how to construct an XML archive format using XML.

Weblink: DeltaXML Latest Developments http://www.deltaxml.com/news/latest-developments.html