.:: Monday, March 26, 2001 >

>>Doug Tidwell
Senior Programmer, IBM Corporation ::.

::. Technical >>

Web Services are the Web's next [r]evolution. Built on Web standards such as XML, SOAP, and HTTP, Web Services allow you to package content and functionality as a self-describing, dynamically-discoverable service, enabling whole new types of applications to be created, formed, and re-formed on the fly. In this session, you'll learn all the details behind this exciting new technology, and be ready to implement and use Web Services in your business.

The objectives of this tutorial are that you will: 1) Understand the architecture of Web Services, including the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), 2) Learn how to convert existing applications into Web Services, and 3) Be ready to change the world.

>>Joseph Gollner
President, XIA Information Architects Corporation ::.

<<Foundation .::

This tutorial provides an overview of XML, its history, purpose and companion specifications. Attendees will understand the basics of the XML Recommendation, including what is meant by well-formed, valid and standalone documents, document type definitions, elements, attributes and entities. Finally, attendees will gain an appreciation of what distinguishes XML from its parent standard, SGML, and what has made XML so attractive within the internet and business communities.

>>Edward Budgen
Director of B2Bi for the EMEA Region, SilverStream Software ::.

>>Business ::.

More than half the world's data resides on mainframes with applications that run corporate mission critical applications. These applications cannot be re-written and writing proprietary application links is costly and time-consuming. XML will play an integral part in exposing these legacy systems to other corporate systems real-time. Enterprises can no longer rely on the orderly world assumptions of EDI to integrate their business systems. Instead, and at the center of the business-to-business revolution, XML provides the core infrastructure for businesses to integrate home grown and legacy applications by rapidly re-purposing systems and processes to expose coherent electronic interfaces to customers, suppliers and other key trading partners.

>>John Ibbotson
XML Technology and Messaging, IBM UK ::.

For effective interoperation between companies, there needs to be a framework of open standards generated and adopted by solution developers and industrial consortia. This tutorial takes a detailed look at the major emerging standards for e-business. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) architects a registry for discovering and connecting to web based services. The ebXML initiative jointly supported by the United Nations and OASIS is producing a set of specifications that together enable a modular electronic business framework. The XML Protocol Working Group was formed as a response to the submission of the SOAP 1.1 specification to the W3C. This tutorial will provide you with a technical and business understanding of these emerging XML standards and architectures.

>>Tomas Hansson
Senior Information Architect, XIA Information Architects Corporation ::.

::. Technical >>

This tutorial provides an overview of Perl and its place in the world of XML. Perl will be evaluated against other processing languages, such as Omnimark and XSLT, and its strengths for text processing and XML manipulation will be explored. Attendees will be given a brief overview of the Perl syntax before specific development case studies are presented that highlight its usefulness in XML applications. Code samples in alternate languages will be demonstrated and compared. In a final example, a subset of Perl will be used inside SoftQuad's XMetaL XML editor to enhance the standard user interface and provide macros for convenient XML data manipulations. Prior knowledge of XML and Perl is strongly recommended, although not essential.

>>Mark Colan
IBM Corporation ::.

<<Foundation .::

This session is a "nuts-and-bolts" introduction to writing stylesheet and transformation scripts used with XSL. The XSLT language is introduced by looking at several transformations and studying how they work (or why they didn't work). You'll learn how XSLT can be used for rendering XML into HTML, performing XML-to-XML vocabulary translations including radical restructuring of data, as well as creating PDF documents from XML data.

>>Vanessa Klein
International Technical Consultant, OmniMark Technologies ::.

>>Business ::.

What is the best way to build an interactive web site? Should you use template driven approaches like those found in ASP and Cold Fusion, or use CGI or server programs written in Perl, Java or OmniMark? In many cases, the right answer is "a mixture of both".

Templates give you a quick and easy way to get started. But as application complexity increases, templates are hard to maintain and your code base can end up scattered all over your web site. Using programming languages gives you maximum processing power and can help keep things organized, but it is inflexible and requires a programmer's intervention to change even simple design elements. Designers and content providers can't get their work done, and programmers are bogged down with tedious maintenance tasks.

The solution is to build custom template processing capabilities into your interactive web applications. You can use templates to give designers and content providers the flexibility they need, while keeping control and organization over your code base. You can design your templates to support the division of responsibilities that makes sense in your organization.

In this tutorial you will learn how to design and build a custom template processing language using XML and XML data sources and how developing such a language can be use to split web development responsibilities in a way that makes sense for their organizations, letting programmers program and designers design.

>>Henry Thompson
, Reader in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, University of Edinburg ::.

The XML family has grown dramatically over the few years since the introduction of XML itself in 1997. This tutorial will describe how the existing (XML 1.0, XML Namespaces, (XML) DOM, XSLT, XPath, XHTML), nearing completion (XLink/XPointer, XML Schema, XML Infoset, XML Signature and Canonicalization, XSL Formating Objects), and only just started (XML Query, XML Protocols) members of the XML family fit together, what their basic concerns are, and where the whole XML story is headed. We'll also cover how the W3C manages the development of XML-related work, and how your company can get involved in this. This tutorial is intended for those with at least some familiarity with XML, who are looking for an overview of what technology and application areas are addressed by existing and planned XML recommendations. Attendees will learn enough detail about each of these to know whether they are relevant to their concerns, and if so where and how to find out more.