Welcome to our November newsletter, we have some notes from the XML 2004 conference in Washington DC and an update on some recent partnerships. The success of XML 2004 was evident from comments on the conference floor. The organisers, IDEAlliance, made efforts to keep this a technically informative event, the consensus from attendees suggests they're succeeding.

With the conference season behind us we're now free to concentrate on some significant initiatives - and we're actively expanding our team to help us develop them. We've reached our market-leading position by working with the brightest and best, if you know of anyone who could contribute to the technical or commercial development of DeltaXML, we'd be very interested to hear from them.

Your feedback is very important to us - this isn't just marketing spin! Understanding what is important in real-world change control has been crucial to our development - please get in touch if there's anything you'd like to suggest or discuss. If you'd like to try DeltaXML technology for yourself, 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:

• Recent DeltaXML Customers
• XML 2004 Conference
• Partners for Success
• Diary Dates

Customer Focus: Recent DeltaXML Customers

Recent customers include:

• Kinnect Limited (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lloyd's of London) (UK) (visit)
  - electronically capturing and transferring data relating to commercial lines insurance risks between brokers and underwriters.

DeltaXML is powering insurance writing applications.
 [Read more...] 

XML 2004 Conference

This year's IDEAlliance conference, XML 2004, was held in Washington DC and was subtitled "From Syntax To Solutions". This emphasis on practical applications of XML was very welcome, and led to an interesting set of (generally very high quality) presentations with a focus on practical experiences with XML. Of particular interest were talks on schema versioning (and the inherent difficulties thereof), on XForms developments and on "binary XML". Schema versioning is becoming a significant industry problem (as we hear from our customers), change control for XML is becoming an issue for an ever wider community. We were told that the volume of "enterprise content" is doubling every three months, in this environment managing change is becoming critical.

The OpenOffice team's work on XForms support which is currently looking very impressive, together with the XForms support being developed for Mozilla a "rich applications environment" using XForms is looking considerably more likely. The "binary XML" effort is still in "requirements capture" mode and is, encouragingly, taking a broader view than simply seeking to reduce markup, with discussions of delta formats. Pipelining was also a hot topic at the conference, with a presentation from our partner 1060 of their NetKernel product and a fascinating insight into Sun's work on hardware-accelerated XML parsing, described as an XML Offload Engine or XOE.

Two impressions remain. The first, elegantly expressed by Michael Daconta, was of a "Copernican shift" from a view of data revolving around applications to one of applications revolving around data. This impression is made stronger by the sheer volumes of data, the degree to which what were once SQL bastions of corporate data are now being made accessible via XML, the maturity and diversity of XML content management and database technologies. The other impression is that XML is no longer seen as an exciting new technology, but rather as a dependable workhorse. As Tim Bray pointed out, the most compelling argument for XML is often to point to experiences such as that of DaimlerChrysler, saving $800,000, with 79% ROI in 1.53 years. This may not appeal much to the technophiles amongst us, but ultimately it will be key to the success of XML.

 Next year's IDEAlliance conference will be in Atlanta, Georgia - we look forward to it.

Weblinks:
http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/ - XML 2004
http://norman.walsh.name/2004/11/19/xml2004.html - Norm Walsh's blog on XML 2004
http://dubinko.info/blog/2004/11.html#perm2004-11-19_openforms - Micah Dubinko on XForms in OpenOffice
http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary - W3C Binary XML

Partners for Success

Efficient and comprehensive XML change control can bring very substantial rewards - but only as part of a larger solution. Our partners are key to delivering systems that solve problems and deliver value, we choose our partnerships carefully and are delighted to announce that as well as our existing partnerships with Vignette, Software AG and others we will now be working with the following companies.

1060 Research: A software infrastructure company developing, licensing and offering professional services for 1060 NetKernel - a Service Oriented Microkernel and XML Application Server.

Systemwire: A software development company with a range of products that perform rule based validation of XML documents.

Parthenon Computing: A complete engineering team working with a development process tailored for entrepreneurial software development.

Sun iForce: We are a Sun iForce development partner- iForce solutions provide you easy access to proven, end-to-end solutions accelerating your time to market.

Weblinks:
http://www.1060research.com/ - 1060 Research
http://www.systemwire.com/  - Systemwire
http://www.parthenoncomputing.com/ - Parthenon
http://uk.sun.com/partners/- Sun iForce.

Diary Dates

http://www.xtech-conference.org/ - XTech 2005, Amsterdam, 24-27 May 2005

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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