Mike Morris

Internet Explorer 5.x has several XML integration features that can streamline development of corporate intranets and other enterprise applications when it's the browser of choice. Complementary technologies, XML data islands and XML data binding, allow for more efficient code while offloading some of the more mundane processing from the Web server to the client. The third feature, XMLHTTP post, allows IE 5.x to easily post XML back to the Web server. What is an XML data island? It's simply XML data that's actually part of the HTML page. By using the XML element, XML data can either be included in the HTML page between an block, commonly called inline XML, or it can be referenced via the XML element's SRC attribute. Inline Duke Arizona By reference more)

Patterns of a Different Kind

Much has been made of .NET's language-neutral features and how programmers can choose from a wide variety of languages ranging from C# and VB.NET to niche languages such as Python and Eiffel. But there is one dialect that all language variants speak - and that is the language of regular expressions. Regular expressions grew out of work done by Hartford, Connecticut-born mathematician Stephen Kleene on what he termed "the algebra of regular sets." His theoretical ideas later formed the basis for early text-manipulation tools on the Unix platform and were further popularized by tigh... (more)

XML in the Enterprise

XML has gained wide acceptance in organizations large and small over the past several years. Part of the reason for this rapid adoption is that XML is intrinsically flexible and simple enough to be used in a variety of problem domains. Vendor support for standards-based implementations of platform tools and utilities has paved the way for individuals and organizations to find new ways to apply this technology. This is further proof that sometimes the simplest of ideas, in this case self-describing data, are the most elegant and powerful. The majority of XML applications today f... (more)