Indroniel Deb Roy

Enterprise applications such as banking, healthcare, and so on still use flat files to import/export data between applications. Flat files contain machine-readable data that is typically encoded in printable characters. There is a growing need for these applications to interact with XML-aware applications and Web services, and to satisfy this need these applications must convert flat file data to an XML format. XML is suited for the interchange of data as XML documents are tagged, easily parsed, and can represent complex data structure. The conversion of a flat file to an XML format requires proper representation of the data embedded in the flat file in some template form so that it can be converted to XML. There are custom solutions based on XML templates and XML dtds made to capture the data structure of flat files to be converted to an XML format, but here a new ... (more)

Data Services Made Easy for Adobe Flex Applications

Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects w... (more)

A Runtime Integration Approach to Application Development

Historically we have seen the success of plug-in based products like Mozilla Firefox and Eclipse IDE where new content can be plugged-in at runtime to augment software functionality.  In plug-in based architecture there is always a base container implementation where other components are added as plug-ins to extend its functionality; however, in these solutions there are no extension points exposed in added plug-in components to interact or bind them together. In this article I discuss the details of a pattern that is a hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate... (more)

A New Way to Look at Portals

Historically, the progress of Web-based applications and the diverse nature of information from different Web applications ushered in the need to unify content to a single point of access: the Web portals. There are several Web portal frameworks being developed in both the J2EE and .NET camp to unify Web content and provide end users with a more efficient environment to interact with the Web. The portal technology is based on the notion of a portal container that provides the basic infrastructure to host a load of disparate applications wrapped up as portlets. To facilitate cros... (more)

XML Journal Feature: Transforming Large XML Documents, An Alternative to XSLT

With the evolution of XML, the XSL standard also became very popular for transforming XML data to XML, text, PDF, etc. However there are some limitations to the XSLT transformation. Today's XSLT processors rely on holding input data in memory as a DOM tree while the transformation is taking place. The tree structure in memory can be as much as ten times the original data size, so in practice, the limit on data size for an XSLT conversion is just a few megabytes. As a result it can only handle XML documents with moderate size - to be processed as the full input, DOM needs to be in... (more)