A Glimpse of What's Ahead

By John Makulowich

What the future holds for companies like IBM Corp. and HardBall Software Inc., as well as for e-business and XML, can be gleaned from a quick review of the papers set for presentation at the third annual GCA XML Developers' Conference in Montreal Aug. 19 and 20. The schedule includes an array of industries and issues, all critical to advance the XML initiative.

Among the noteworthy speakers and topics are:


?Dongwook Shin, National Library of Medicine, "Making XML Documents Searchable Through the Web"


?David Orchard, IBM, "Lessons from a Scalable Live XML Solution"


?David vun Kannon, KPMG, "Supporting Enterprise Architecture Methodologies at KPMG"


?Fabio Arciniegas and Rubby Casallas, Universidad de los Andes, "An Academic Tests Manager"


?Geoffrey Fox, Syracuse University, "Shared Places on the Web: XML for Web-based Collaboration"


?Len Berman, IBM, "Data Descriptors by Example"


?F. Curbera, D. Epstein, T. Poon, IBM, "Efficient Encoding of XML Updates"


?Simon St. Laurent, "XML Processing Description Language"


?Nisheeth Ranjan, Netscape, "XML and Related Standards Support in Gecko"


For example, the paper by Shin will cover structured searching using XML that allows users to capture partial contents, whether a whole document or just part of one. The tool to do this is XML Retrieval System, or XRS. It does a structural search and renders the retrieved contents in HTML.

As Shin noted in his abstract, XRS uses some new techniques. One is the bottom-up scheme technique developed for efficiently indexing and retrieving structured documents. Another is the use of a Java component that renders the XML output into HTML.

Another paper, by Orchard from IBM, covers lessons learned and tips for developers from one of IBM's first Web application solutions produced using XML, called the IBM Student Server. Orchard promised attendees they would learn about the practical application of XML and its standards in Java and Web applications, with real-world examples, issues and solutions aiding them in their own application development.

Orchard, senior technical architect at IBM's newest development center in Vancouver, Canada, is designing Java, XML and Web-based components and solutions for the education, sports and finance industries.