William Cooper reports from XML ONE Europe, held on 6-8 October, in London, UK.

XML ONE was the European focus for around a thousand developers with an interest in XML, following the success of a similar event held in Texas in the spring. Such is the pace of change in the XML world that there were many new developments to discuss. The range of sessions available ranged from the introductory 'new readers start here' to the more strategic.

Keynote presentations from IBM, Oracle and Sun highlighted the considerable support for XML and Java offered by these leading vendors, while Microsoft outlined their strategy in a separate series of presentations.

Simon Phipps, IBM's Java and XML Evangelist gave an entertaining presentation on IBM's strategy. He described the problem of 'entropy death' caused by the increasing complexity of co-dependent systems. He proposed a new foundation based upon the web, Java, XML, TCP/IP and public key security leading to a vendor and platform neutral environment. Apparently IBM has 500 developers currently working on XML, with much of their work available at their on alphaworks site.

The affinity of XML and Java was a theme that emerged from the conference, with XML offering portability of data and Java providing platform independent code, and both benefiting from the development of open standards and widespread adoption. It has been said, perhaps somewhat provocatively, that XML finally gave Java something to chew on.

Conversely, it appears that Perl provides considerably less support for XML developers. The language that has proved so useful to web masters for text manipulation, typically based upon pattern matching regular expressions, is perhaps less suitable for the more structured, object-oriented world of XML. Irrespective, the raft of high quality Java tools freely available may present a compelling case to many web developers.

Bill Smith of Sun Microsystems, co-chair of the W3C, provided an outline of support for XML from Sun. Bill is also President of Oasis, the non-profit consortium dedicated to the advancement of structured information standards like XML.

The enthusiasm with which major vendors have embraced open standards and open source software is indeed remarkable and potentially a significant threat to Microsoft. To be fair, the latter's latest browser is a significant contribution to the arsenal of available tools. Current indications that XML and XSL support in the Microsoft browser will not be updated until formal standards are ratified. Notably there was negligible representation or even mention of Netscape or the Mozilla project at this particular conference.

Pierre Leon provided the Oracle road map for "XML in a Relational World" and outlined some of the new technology in their 8i database and their forthcoming iFS Internet File System. This can appear as a network drive allowing the direct storage of any file. There was also a suggestion that the next release of Oracle would support XML documents as a fundamental data type. Oracle is also making some of its key XML technology freely available on its technet.

A show of hands in one session confirmed the impression that Oracle has overwhelming market share, with a small minority committed to Sybase and in this case only one admitting to using Informix. Oracle's virtual monopoly on the market according to this audience is remarkable.

On the horizon, however, the potential synergy between XML and object-oriented databases was another emergent theme, with the suggestion that XML may also give the OO database world something more to do. The relative merits of relational versus object models offer plenty of scope for religious debate.

Object Design demonstrated their eXcelon XML server based upon their established ObjectStore database, capable of storing XML documents natively. Telecommunication is currently a core market for their object database technology. Apparently 10% of BT's call revenue goes through an ObjectStore database.

There was much interest at SoftQuad's exhibition stand in their XMetaL content authoring tool. This aims to bring word-processor style editing to XML document creation, combined with support for various back-end content management systems, including integration with Poet and ObjectStore.

Chrystal Software, a Xerox company, also unveiled at the conference an integrated bridge to their Astoria content management system.

Interleaf, in their guise as the e-content company, demonstrated their BladeRunner content management solution, providing round-trip XML editing using extensions to Microsoft Word.

Oliver Schmelzle of Vignette described the ICE Information and Content Exchange push/pull protocol for content syndication. This initiative, backed by vendors including Microsoft, Adobe and Sun, sees Vignette playing a leading role with the Syndication Server component of StoryServer and suggestions of an open source reference implementation in the pipeline.

With so much expected of XML, beyond its origins as a document format, it was becoming clear to many that to succeed as a generalised data format and lingua franca for business to business use, stronger data typing would be required than provided by DTD's. The various competing schema proposals under consideration may offer this promise. Indications suggest that there is much to work out in this area at the W3C.

Microsoft took the opportunity to promote their new BizTalk Framework, a set of guidelines for how to publish schemas in XML.

In a separate camp, Norbert Mikula of DataChannel promoted the Oasis initiative, backed by IBM, Oracle and Sun, among others, to develop a vendor neutral Registry and Repository of DTDs and schemata at XML.org. However, issues involved in the creation of a controlled taxonomy for the classification of schemata should not be underestimated.

Indeed, while XML may attempt to address character set problems, there appeared to be a general assumption among many that the language of XML would be based upon English. Perhaps XML is indeed the new ASCII, a subtle cultural imperialism that may have profound economic significance.

The combination of XML and Java appears to offer a potent combination that may ultimately be far more significant than the first wave web revolution produced by HTTP and HTML.

Despite some thinly veiled rivalry apparent between Microsoft and the rest of the software world, there did appear to be genuine potential for sanity to prevail, with vendors falling over themselves to commit to supporting standards just as soon as they are ratified. Indeed the quality of the standards work that is currently being undertaken in this field is particularly impressive.

Fittingly perhaps, the final day of the conference coincided with the announcement that XSLT and XPath have moved to being W3C Proposed Recommendations.

Stateside developers can anticipate their own XML ONE conference with more of the same at Santa Clara in Silicon Valley in November, by which time, no doubt, further XML announcements may be expected.

William Cooper

Any views expressed are those of the author writing in a personal capacity.