eNode — The Second Coming of the Web

White Paper

The Second Coming

Several new XML-based initiatives are currently under way to herald the Second Coming of the Web, prominent among which, are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).

SOAP enables remote web services to be invoked over the Web without regard to the programming language or distributed object infrastructure used by the service, while UDDI seeks to create a global registry of such services, and to provide facilities for discovering them.

With universal description, discovery, and integration of distributed web services on the horizon, applications that integrate services from disparate sources will be dynamically assembled using information gleaned from “yellow pages” stored in UDDI registries, but it is not a foregone conclusion that most of them would be accessed through a web browser.

While HTML browsers have served us well over the past decade, developers who fail to look beyond the browser risk alienating users, especially if they continue to provide a sub-optimal user experience for web services that require substantial human interaction.

Cognizant of the limitations of describing presentation content directly in HTML, developers are already turning to XML for greater flexibility and control. The most popular approach is to encode content in application-specific XML format, and to generate alternative renditions “on the fly” from the original format by applying XSL Transformations. Common transformations include XML to HTML, WML, SVG, RTF, PDF, and other formats.

It is noteworthy that there are standards (either de facto, or established by standards bodies) for specialized tasks, such as describing web pages, graphics, rich text, portable documents, and so on. However, no such standard exists for describing graphical user interfaces. With XML-based languages poised to supplant HTML as the lingua franca for describing web content, this opens up new windows of opportunity.

The market is clearly ready for a viable XML-based solution to this problem. At the same time, an interesting drama is unfolding with the Java™ platform that has a direct bearing on this.

A Fresh Start