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-----   PETER COFFEE'S ENTERPRISE IT ADVANTAGE   -----
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A weekly newsletter from eWEEK Technology Editor Peter
Coffee focused on application development and technologies
at the cutting edge of enterprise-class computing.

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November 16, 2004 

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In This Edition
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PETER COFFEE: Cutting and Sewing with XML

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PETER COFFEE
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Cutting and Sewing with XML

Multi-source transformation and integration is a pathway to 
valuable applications.

by Peter Coffee

It's rarely a term of praise to compare an IT system to a 
quilt. In an IT context, I usually see the "q" word with a 
prefix like "patchwork" or even "crazy"--labeling a system 
as combining all sorts of independently developed elements 
with no coherent overall design.

With several quilters in my family, though, I think of their
craft as creating a new and unique higher-level pattern by 
combining pre-existing component patterns in a way that 
embodies some original theme. That image came to my mind the
other day when I was thinking of the opportunity to extract
and recombine XML data, from many sources, into a new and 
added-value combination in the same way that a quilter works
with fabrics.

A quilting metaphor illuminates the developer opportunity 
that XML provides. It's hard to imagine combining pieces of 
metal and plastic, or leather and glass, in the way that a 
quilter joins pieces of fabric. Heterogeneous combinations 
like the ones I've just mentioned are like combinations of 
arbitrary binary data structures: They require tricky 
integration techniques and produce awkward products that 
can't be handled correctly without detailed knowledge of 
exactly how they were put together and from what.

Read the rest of Peter's column here.
http://eletters.eweek.com/zd1/cts?d=79-1398-6-7-214274-153414-1

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