Craig King

I and a colleague were working on a research project when we saw an opportunity to approach our data management from a different angle. XML appeared on the scene, and when IBM alphaWorks released its first parser we were on our way, using XML to solve our data access problems. During several Department of Defense research projects since the mid-1990s, my colleague and I have had the opportunity to explore various techniques for accessing different types of data sources using XML. These data sources include relational databases, CORBA objects, flat files, and, more recently, LDAP and the J2EE Connector architecture. Initially we used JDBC to access the relational data sources. The JDBC code was tedious to write, however, and difficult to update when new database schemas were released. XML As a Data Access Language We started out using XML as a way to specify the common... (more)