Chapter 13. Business-to-Business

At this point, we've covered quite a bit of ground. We've examined the SAX, DOM, and JDOM APIs, and you should now feel familiar with web publishing frameworks and advanced transformations, XML-RPC, using XML for configuration information and as a data source, and creating XML from within your Java code. However, the one hot topic we have not yet spent time on is "business-to-business" applications. As companies have moved into the Internet era, communication has become the number one commodity for commerce. In fact, many companies thrive on their communication lines more than they do on their product offerings; aggressive online campaigns and e-business applications can overcome significant competition from other vendors. Spearheading this surge of business-to-business application development is XML. Because of the standard XML provides for data representation, companies have been able to communicate for the first time over disparate applications, systems, and programming languages.

In this chapter, we look at using XML to provide this sort of communication across application and company lines, using some companies invented for our purposes. Instead of focusing on XML for communication between application components or as a data source, we look at using XML to communicate between applications. To begin with, we examine the Foobar Public Library, a library that is allowing their suppliers to enter online new books being shipped to the library. These books are then added to the library's data store for later use. Unfortunately, the library is having a hard time finding good Java developers, so it has implemented a Perl-based CGI solution. New books are entered online and then stored by a Perl script.