Java and XML complement each other perfectly. “Portable Code, Portable Data,” is Sun’s tagline for describing how Java and XML work together, and it’s right on the money. One of the best reasons for using Java is its portability; you write for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not a specific platform. Your application will run on any platform that has a JVM. Java supports Unicode from the ground up, so you have internationalization built right into your application; localization, of course, is another issue. It is a clean, easy-to-use object-oriented language that has gained widespread use and acceptance.
Java and XML complement each other perfectly. “Portable Code, Portable Data,” is Sun’s tagline for describing how Java and XML work together, and it’s right on the money. One of the best reasons for using Java is its portability; you write for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not a specific platform. Your application will run on any platform that has a JVM. Java supports Unicode from the ground up, so you have internationalization built right into your application; localization, of course, is another issue. It is a clean, easy-to-use object-oriented language that has gained widespread use and acceptance.
There are many reasons why XML has achieved the same widespread use and acceptance that Java has. First, XML is a standard that defines a language to create markup languages. This standard is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), not any particular company. So, you don’t have to worry about different “flavors” of XML causing incompatibilities across platforms. And since there is only one standard, every XML parser will parse valid XML. There are numerous free XML parsers and APIs with years of development and use available instantly. You don’t have to write your own parser for your customized data format — a potentially lengthy and costly endeavor. XML documents have an intrinsically hierarchical structure, which makes it easy to build hierarchies of objects in your application. Finally, processing international documents is much simpler since XML parsers must support Unicode encoded files.
In previous issues, Norm Walsh…
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