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"XML by Example," my first book, was published last month. To celebrate, this month is a special issue of Pineapplesoft Link on XML for electronic commerce.

XML and e-commerce

I wish you a very successful year! Thank you for your support to Pineapplesoft Link over the past years.

To help start the new year free of unwanted spam, I would like to invite you to sign the petition against spam http://www.politik-digital.de/spam. This petition is for European citizen only.

I announced it three months ago; it was published on the 14th December by Que; I am talking of my first book, "XML by Example". As the name implies, "XML by Example" is a tutorial that is part of the "by Example" series from Que.

Unlike other XML tutorials, XML by Example was written with e-commerce in mind, not document publishing. In practice, it means that the examples are mainly derived from e-commerce applications, not publishing and the topic covered are those topics relevant to e-commerce.

In this issue, I discuss the role that XML is increasingly playing in e-commerce. I have also include the press release for "XML by Example."

XML and e-commerce

When I remember the early days of the XML/EDI Group http://www.xmledi-group.org, I measure how much change we have witnessed since 1997. In those days, few people were interested in XML and yet today, only 2 years and a half later, XML is big in e-commerce. And that's a good thing.

Behind this change in mentality is a better understanding that e-commerce is not limited to online shopping. Obviously Amazon.com and other online shops are important but so also are less visible forms of e-commerce and particularly commerce between companies.

As individuals, you and I are involved in a great deal of commercial activity: we go to the baker, to the cinema, we buy cars and occasionally have our hair cut.

Our businesses however, your organization and my own, Pineapplesoft, are involved in a lot more commercial activity than we, as individuals, are. Companies buy Internet access, stationery, entrance to conferences and machinery. Commerce between companies is known as business to business commerce or B2B, as opposed to commerce between business and consumer or B2C.

With B2B comes volume. When you walk in a bookstore and buy a book, that's what you buy: one book. The bookstore is also buying books but it buys dozen of them at a time from a wholesaler. The wholesale buys hundreds, if not thousands of books from a distributor or directly from the publisher.

In other words, for one B2C transaction, there are several B2B transactions involved. The bookstore send orders, it receives the goods and invoices. It pays the invoices which result in bank statements. To decide when to reorder a specific title, the bookstore track stock levels. Did I mention errors that result in yet more documents? You get the idea: the administrative overhead is significant.

XML Web Site

Because the overhead cuts into the profit, businesses, particularly large businesses, try to cut down the administrative overhead. They aim to simplify and automate repetitive, slow and error-prone tasks like reading orders, writing invoices or preparing checks.

The web offers tremendous opportunity for automatization. Compare a traditional mail-order company with a web shop. The traditional mail-order company has dozens of typists just to punch the orders in the computer system. Web shops cut through the fat: the customer enters his or her order into the ordering system himself.

Now XML promises to bring the same sort of simplification to B2B commerce. Imagine a sort of robot browser, that is smart enough to browse the site, to recognize useful information like product number, price or stock level and automatically fill-in forms.

Imagine you pick a book in a bookstore. The store computer can automatically log into the wholesaler to inquire about remaining stocks and, possibly, reorder.

This only works if this robot browser can decode the web site, recognizing prices from quantities from ISBN numbers. And this is where XML kicks in, of course. Because XML, unlike HTML, makes it possible to identify individual pieces of information in the page and assign each of them a special tag: <price>, <quantity> and <isbn>.

I like to compare XML pages with small, self-contained databases: each piece of information is clearly identified in a structure: in effect, the bookstore downloads a small "database" with all the information about a given book.

Conclusion

In summary, XML makes it possible for computers at two companies to dialog and automatically exchange information. They can conduct business, at least the costly and slow administrative part of it automatically.

Some companies refer to this sort of setup as an B2B portal: it is essentially a web site where you can download information on their products and upload orders. Data is exchanged in XML so software can automatically decode it.

If you are familiar with EDI, these concepts are not new for you. This is a new technical solution to the old problem of interoperability. The major change is that it is built in a pure Internet environment.

If you forgive me this shameless plug: the last chapter of "XML by Example", is a sample application that demonstrates most of the concepts I touched upon in this article.

As eCommerce Grows, Understanding XML Becomes a Key Job Skill

For Immediate Release

Contact (US): Julie Bowen, jbowen@mcp.com, 317-581-3575
Contact (Europe): Benoît Marchal, , + 32 81 226 270

INDIANAPOLIS: The growing popularity of eCommerce continues to change the business world. Yet some of the most crucial tools of eCommerce are a mystery, even for many successful Cyberspace business owners.

One of the most important tools for building and maintaining eCommerce sites is a markup language called XML. Like the more well-known but less powerful HTML, XML lets Web designers organize a document by structure, so that changing a document's appearance is a simple matter of changing the definition of an element once, and letting the changes ripple through an entire file-or a huge Web site.

But XML takes document structure to the next level, by allowing tags not just for formatting, but for data elements. For example, prices and catalog numbers can have their own element tag. This allows powerful data manipulation on Web sites offering thousands of different items. Corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, and Netscape are releasing a wide range of XML-compatible products. XML also integrates seamlessly with JavaScript, Java, Perl, C++, and other major computer languages.

Now, Que, an imprint of Macmillan, offers an easy teaching tool that unveils the mysteries of XML. XML by Example, by Belgian software consultant and markup language expert Benoît Marchal, allows the reader to learn the fundamentals of XML. Numerous examples and illustrations are included in the 505-page book (ISBN #0-7897-2242-9)-concluding with a real-life eCommerce example. Publication date is December 1999, and the book is $24.95 in the U.S.

As with all eight titles in Que's By Example series, each chapter follows a logical, linear progression. The reader gains understanding in small, manageable chunks, while sidebars offer tips, cautions, and other ways to integrate the information into actual skills. The author is available for e-mail and telephone interviews. To order review copies, email prorders@macmillanusa.com.

Self-promotion department

The big event this month is "XML by Example" but it is worth noting that three other articles got published.

Gamelan released a two articles series on JavaMail. It shows how to build a webmail using JavaMail. "WebMail in Java: Sending E-mail" is at http://www.gamelan.com/journal/techworkshop/121799_webmail1.html and "WebMail in Java: Reading E-mail" is at http://www.gamelan.com/journal/techworkshop/122799_webmail2.html.

The good folks at the Sun | Netscape Alliance have also release a follow-up to the popular "Servlet Programming for Teams." It is entitled "More Servlet Programming for Teams" and is available at http://developer.iplanet.com/viewsource/marchal_xml2/marchal_xml2.html.

About Pineapplesoft Link

Pineapplesoft Link is a free email magazine. Each month, it discusses technologies, trends and facts of interest to web developers.

The information and design of this issue of Pineapplesoft Link are owned by Benoit Marchal and Pineapplesoft. Permission to copy or forward it is hereby granted provided it is prefaced with the words: "As appeared in Pineapplesoft Link - http://www.pineapplesoft.com."

Editor: Benoit Marchal
Publisher: Pineapplesoft www.psol.be

Acknowledgments: thanks to Sean McLoughlin MBA for helping me with this issue.

Back issues are available at http://www.psol.be/old/1/newsletter/.

Although the editor and the publisher have used reasonable endeavors to ensure accuracy of the contents, they assume no responsibility for any error or omission that may appear in the document.

Last update: January 2000.
© 2000, Benoît Marchal. All rights reserved.
Design, XSL coding & photo: PineappleSoft OnLine.