XML and SOAP programming for BizTalk servers

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XML and SOAP programming for BizTalk servers

• Chapter 1
• The XML Business Perspective

Teacher??? ?? Reporter??? GI2-27
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The XML Business Perspective

• E-commerce is huge and growing in importance
  every day. But what is e-commerce?
• Adam Smith, the father of modern economic theory,
  said that capitalism is what people do when they
  are left alone
• I think most people would consider this to be a
  transaction enabled by e-commerce. But are there
  others? If commerce is the interaction of buyers
  and sellers?
• In this book, I will focus on this
  business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, and how
  you can use the eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
  to lower transaction costs. There are a number of
  initiatives happening in several industries
  today. I'd like to mention some of these and
  focus on one in particular, BizTalk, so that you
  can see how a typical B2B transaction might work.

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Business-to-Business E-Commerce

• When we hear about Amazon.com's problem of
  warehousing their previously virtual inventory,
  we are hearing about the new problems of B2C
  e-commerce. When we hear about eBay's overloaded
  servers shutting down when people come home from
  work, we are hearing about the vast potential and
  pent-up demand of B2C e-commerce.
• Think about a simple ink pen. When you buy a pen
  from an online retailer.

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Separation of Data from Process

• XML provides a syntax to capture the richness of
  the transactions, making the transactions
  accurate and timely.
• To all of these people, however, XML provides at
  least one common benefit XML allows them to
  separate their data from the processes that act
  on that data.
• XML provides a syntax that allows you to define
  each information object in an unambiguous way. By
  doing so, you can capture the information as one
  object and then process it with many different
  applications depending upon the requirements at
  the time.

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XML and Three-Tier Web Architectures

Three-tier Web architecture showing the data,
middle, and client tiers.
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• Data Tier
• It is a conceptual place where data sources are
  made available to processes running on another
  tier. Whether the data tier is a single machine,
  many machines, or a set of virtual HTTP
  connections.
• Client Tier
• In this example, we will rely strictly on thin
  clientsusually a Web browser. A thin client is
  called "thin" because most of the processing is
  done on the server and shipped to the browser for
  display purposes. Modern Web browsers have the
  ability to do more processing than they are
  usually called on to do.
• Middle Tier
• Between the data tier and the client tier sits
  the middle tier. In the middle tier, business
  processes are applied to data from the data tier
  and the result is sent to the client tier. In
  other words, the middle tier is where the work
  gets done.

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The Web server passes HTTP header information to
a personalization application, which queries a
database containing subscriber information. The
VisitorID field is used to access the information
for each particular user.
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• SQL and XML

• Structured Query Language (SQL) is a
  straightforward language designed to get
  information out of a relational database.
• Wouldn't it be nice to send an open standard
  request (SQL) to any database, and get back a
  standard response? (Might I suggest XML?) Several
  database manufacturers are working on a solution
  to this problem. Let's take a look at the
  Microsoft approach.
• A Microsoft ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) Recordset
  object can persist a recordset as an XML stream
  with a fixed schema, or set of specifications.
• The schema is a fixed schema defined by the
  database, but it can easily be transformed into
  whatever schema form you need by using an
  Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
  Transformations, or (XSLT) style sheet.

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• HTML as XML

You will see later that HTML is sort of like XML.
An HTML document is an XML document if it adheres
to a number of rules called well-formedness
constraints. This means that we can continue to
use HTML in our environment for display while
using XML tools to process the information.
The marketing application uses information about
when the visitor last visited the site to look
for new company information.
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• E-Commerce Services

Adding another database to the data tier. The
online catalog is a SQL database, so we can use
the same SQL-to-XML technique as we used with the
subscriber profile.
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• Content

External data sites become part of our data tier,
and an aggregation application is used to
integrate this new data in the middle tier.
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• SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol)
• How the data gets from external sites to our
  site. E-mail, FTP..
• However, HTTP has been used as the preferred
  connection protocol. HTTP is preferable because
  it's a simple protocol to process and, most
  important, it passes through almost any firewall.
• SOAP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
  Internet draft that lets you invoke procedures on
  remote systems by using a standard set of XML
  tags.
• SOAP uses HTTP as its data request and response
  protocol, so you can deploy it quickly and
  efficiently to get data between you and your
  content-provider partners.

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• XML for Content Providers

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Each syndication partner requires a specialized
converter that transforms its custom structure
into a form that our page can use.
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Multiply the customer conversion approach by the
number of sites using content, and the problems
with individual sites are also multiplied.
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• Standards

News Industry Text Format (NITF), and the Wire
Service Committee became the News Information
Task Force (NITF). In 1998, the NITF
specification was reviewed and turned into an XML
schema.
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XML for Content Management

• The focus of this book is using XML for
  business-to-business e-commerce transactions.
  Because of XML's nature as an enabler of
  self-describing transactions, it is a natural fit
  for e-commerce.
• Business pressures on content providers are
  forcing them to look at the way they maintain
  their information objects.
• Think about ita printed document is not really
  the actual information. The document is just one
  representation of the information, formatted for
  the medium of paper because paper is a convenient
  form of distributing content.
• With the advent of the CD-ROM in the early 1990s,
  content providers found they had a problem with
  paper.

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XML for Content Aggregation

• Consider the world of automobiles before the Web.
  To buy a car, you had to spend a lot of time
  going from dealership to dealership to compare
  prices, service, and the features you wanted.
  This required a lot of time and expense on the
  part of both buyer and seller.

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• Suppose we wanted to create this site. We could
  repeat the weather example above and go to
  Jaguar, and then to Honda, and then to all the
  other manufacturers. This would be a
  time-consuming process and probably not worth the
  trouble for the amount of revenue the site would
  generate.
• However, we are not the only site that uses this
  information. As in the NITF (news industry text
  format) example, there are many providers of
  information about cars
• Car manufacturers provide technical
  specifications and configuration options for
  their cars.
• The automobile press provides critical reviews of
  cars their readers care about.
• Auto enthusiasts such as local and national car
  clubs or collectors' societies have information
  about the cars they care about.
• Insurance companies have information concerning
  actuarial data so that you know how much your
  insurance will be.
• The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and
  various national governments provide safety
  information from crash tests of cars.
• Car dealers provide information about their
  prices and services.

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The Background Of Electronic Document Interchange

• The granddaddy of electronic interchange is the
  electronic data interchange specification, or
  EDI. In the early 1970s
• By the late 1970s, the government, and computer
  manufacturers began to address developing a
  method of improving and standardizing electronic
  business communications.
• The American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
  chartered the Accredited Standards Committee
  (ASC) X12 in 1979.
• X12 was the first of several standard formats
  for doing business electronically.
• Various X12 committees worked on standards for
  specific documentsmostly invoices and purchase
  orders. Each specification had to work for all
  users in all situations standards were therefore
  complex and difficult to implement.
• This brief history illustrates the two-sided
  nature of standards they need to be general
  enough to be adopted, yet specific enough to be
  useful.

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• XML for Electronic Document Interchange
• XML is a standard created by the World Wide Web
  Consortium (W3C).
• The problems with EDI over the last quarter
  century (long development times, varying
  requirements across companies, and difficulty
  implementing a one-size-fitsall specification) .
  A group called XML/EDI is working on a more open
  version of the EDI specifications.
• Another of these efforts is the ebXML Initiative.
  The "eb" stands for "electronic business." The
  United Nations /CEFACT and the Organization for
  the Advancement of Structured Information
  Standards (OASIS)an XML industry groupare
  working on ebXML.
• XML and E-Commerce
• So where does XML fit into all of this?
  Everywhere. XML is just a set of rulesa
  syntaxfor marking up data. It is a small,
  standard, compact syntax, however, and that's
  where its value comes in. XML provides a syntax
  for communicating in a direct.
• Another aspect of XML and e-commerce is trust.
  XML can provide a level of verification because
  information about your transaction can be carried
  right along with it.

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• XML and Processing Languages
• Because of its open status, XML works on any
  platform with any programming language. XML
  really doesn't do anythingit's just a syntax
  that provides a way of thinking about and
  representing your data. The key benefit of XML is
  that it allows you to separate your data from the
  processes that act on your data.
• You have probably heard a lot about XML and
  JavaXML for representing data and Java for
  processing it.