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XML and Java: Siblings or rivals?
Can the Sun technology continue to rally as a platform in the face of the new markup language's rapid ascent?
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XML offers a way to create open data that isn't dependent on a platform, language, or restrictive formatting convention. If widely adopted, XML could become a de facto standard for communicating content and objects down to clients -- or among servers and enterprises.
And that sounds a lot like what Java does, at least as an object platform. It's just such a role for XML that appeals to Microsoft, which disdains Java's use for purposes other than programming.
"We see XML as being the next protocol on which a lot of exciting stuff is built," said Dave Wascha, XML product manager at Microsoft. "The benefit of XML is that it allows you to exchange information across platforms, not to be confused with writing applications that are cross-platform."
By adding native XML support in future version of Windows, its tools, and its browsers, Microsoft is promising developers that they can draw on XML to read and manipulate data as it moves between applications and components.
Microsoft also has plans for "server-side XML," whereby XML can be used as a standard method of passing data between heterogeneous distributed application servers, as well as across multiple operating systems, the company said at its recent Professional Developers Conference in Denver, CO.
For many, however, it's not a matter of either/or when it comes to Java and XML.
"You can think about using an XML-based object capability as a simpler way of doing CORBA and DCOM, but it sounds like that's a ways off," said David Skok, chairman and founder of SilverStream Software in Burlington, MA. "From our side, we're doing both XML and Java, and see them as wonderfully complementary."
Analysts agree. "I think that a Java strategy without an XML strategy is incomplete," said Eric Brown, analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, MA. "The two are not competitive. But there are some overlapping areas, and companies are finding that XML is inexorably a part of managing content."
That jibes with what IBM, a driving force behind both Java and XML, seems to have in mind.
"XML and Java are entirely complementary," said Simon Phipps, head of XML marketing and Java evangelist for IBM in Hursley, England. "How XML negates the value of Java is mystical to me. The two are entirely parallel and complementary and symbiotic. Both are crucial to computing in the new millennium."
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