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DeltaXML Newsletter - October 2004

Welcome to this month's newsletter, as we prepare for the XML 2004 conference in Washington, accelerate our expansion both in the US and in Europe and continue our R&D work. While we're delighted at the commercial success we're seeing we are determined to keep a focus on our core competencies, we'll continue to invest in the R&D necessary to innovate in XML change control and leave it to others to develop the higher level applications being demanded by users. If you'd like to explore adding value by layering on top of our engine please do get in touch.

Evaluation downloads of the DeltaXML Core API, together with full documentation and online demos, are always available at our website: www.deltaxml.com

    - The DeltaXML Team.

Contents

In this newsletter:

Customer Focus: Recent DeltaXML Customers

Recent customers include:

DeltaXML is powering contract management and product lifecycle management solutions.
 [Read more...] 

XML 2004 Conference

  This year the industry will be meeting up in Washington for a conference titled "From Syntax to Solutions". The vision of XML as a medium that could bring together diverse disciplines, expressed by Jon Bosak back in Nov 1996[1], is becoming a reality. For example, thanks to XML, we can apply the same change processing and synchronization techniques to legal documents, product databases and telecoms topology maps. There's plenty of marketing hype about the advantages of such genericity, but even when it's boiled away we see that there has been a Kuhnian paradigm shift, that "documents" and "data" are, for the first time, largely interchangeable. We're looking forward to some insights into the consequences of this shift from some of the speakers at the conference.

We'll be presenting a couple of papers at the conference. The first, Powering XML Pipelines with JAXP[2], is a technical paper suggesting best practices when building XML processing "pipelines" using Java. The pipelining technique is one we use extensively for configuring DeltaXML, it borrows from the Unix "pipes" concept and leads to architectures based on "small pieces, loosely joined", which are adaptable, highly efficient and resilient. This paper is a hands-on look at the Java standard for implementing such pipelines, JAXP, and the lessons learned when trying to implement complex and branching pipeline architectures.

Our second paper, Conflict Resolution in XML - Forms For All[3], looks at the problem of conflict resolution, where conflicting changes have been made to a document, and how it can be handled using XML Forms, and particularly XForms. When synchronizing concurrent edits many changes can be accepted without review, but there are often conflicts - such as "item deleted in A, edited in B" - for which manual intervention is often the most appropriate solution. How can we allow such intervention while still keeping the advantages of a pipelined "everything in XML" approach? XML forms offer an attractive solution to this problem, we examine the problem more carefully and  look at the practical solutions available.

If you're coming to the conference and would like to ask us more about either of these subjects or more generally about DeltaXML, we'll be in Washington all week, do please get in touch and we can arrange to meet. Hope to see you there!

Weblinks:

http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/
[1] http://www.isgmlug.org/n3-1/n3-1-18.htm
[2] http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/2004/thursday.html#p5
[3] http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/2004/thursday.html#p26

Diary Dates

Weblinks:
DeltaXML news: http://www.deltaxml.com/news/

Please let us know whether this newsletter has been useful to you, we welcome any suggestions about information you'd like discussed in future editions. We'll be back next month with another edition.

© 2004 DeltaXML and Monsell EDM Ltd.

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