The third XML Forum (link in French) organized in Paris started this morning under a tag line of "e-business integration". It represents a good opportunity to recall why XML is important for e-business and what the future might look like.

During the opening session, Frank Gilbane (Bluebill Advisors) suggested a parallel between the history of programming languages moving towards late binding to provide more flexibility even at the cost of a performance decrease and XML.

There are many ways of using XML, but the possibility to map and bind XML into one's business objects as late as possible is giving e-business the flexibility it needs to develop. Hervé Crespel (France Telecom) took the ball further showing how XML is a key technology to build loosely coupled systems.

The shift of focus and the difference of scale of new generations of e-business systems was very visible during another session.

Odile Troulet-Lambert (France Telecom) showed a methodology marrying UML and XML to design "one to one" systems to perform e-business between two major companies, while Bill Owen (Kewill) reported how his company has deployed a "one to many" BizTalk application for Siemens Automation and Drives to do e-commerce with hundreds of their distributors. James Tauber (Bowstreet) explained how "many to many" XML based web services would allow any company to do e-commerce with any other.

This explosion in the number of potential e-commerce partners, e-commerce systems and e-business vocabularies appears to be worrying many. As Hervé Crespel warns us, "XML is rhyming with Babel" and this explosion has to be mastered. Many presentations about the XML.org repository, ebXML and other initiatives are trying to address this fear.