The software delivery process has long faced many challenges, many of which are exacerbated by the need for organizations to update their internal architectures and the methodologies they use to build and deliver solutions. Over 80% of software projects are delivered late, over 50% don't deliver required features and cost overruns exceed 15% on average.

Popular assumptions can often be dangerous. We will consider how the many unique and highly-regarded architectural characteristics of SOA, such as loose-coupling, can actually be a two-edged sword affecting the requirements, nature, and success of many important aspects of SOA, especially runtime governance. The success of any SOA requires that one must gain an understanding of the true nature, performance characteristics, and availability of the business transactions that flows in real-time through these highly distributed services and their supporting IT infrastructure. This session will emphasize practical considerations that impact SOA architects, security managers, application support personnel, and designers so that you can be prepared to deliver a verifiably reliable and successful SOA, and can effectively remediate SOA failures and risks in real-time.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

Since its inception, XML has been criticized for the overhead it introduces into the enterprise infrastructure. Business data encoded in XML takes five to 10 times more bandwidth to transmit in the network and proportionally more disk space to store.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors improve Web services performance for customers: XML-binary Optimized Packaging, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism, and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block.

Forum Systems' latest version of Web Services Security Gateway, contains a number of security measure to address event-driven applications. It is estimated that XML traffic will nearly double in a year's time.

Justsystem, based in Japan, is previewing a technology that many say has the potential to bring seismic change in the way XML is used. With xfy, different XML documents can be joined together and used, without interoperability issues.

Pioneering content management company, Mark Logic, has partnered with Stylus Studio, in an effort to make building XML content-centric applications easier for its customers.

Microsoft's Derek Denny-Brown explores the various issues he has with the XML 1.0 specification, including whitespace, allowed characters, and lastly XML Namespaces - 'which pushes an immense burden of complexity onto the APIs and XML reader/writer implementations,' argues Denny-Brown.

The producers of the XMLSPY development environment, Altova, today announced availability of its XMLSPY Certification Exam, an expert-level, 50 question exam designed to test developers' knowledge of important XML-related specifications as well as their proficiency with XMLSPY 2004.

One of the basic challenges of XML developers is formulating best practices and design guides for defining their XML content. In the financial industry, the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) Forum has been working for over seven years to develop a business message specification to satisfy the need for a community vocabulary and messaging specification in the retail and commercial banking arenas

For the biologist, the bioinformatic analysis of genes requires the compilation of tables of gene characteristics. To do this, data is often taken manually out of databases in an ad hoc fashion. Different databases (TIGR, MIPS, BLAIR, and NCBI, for example) give different outputs in different formats. We would like to be able to extract information from the databases in a common, structured file format in a way that allows for easy rearranging and processing of the data.

The emerging world without wires has fostered a growing number of small and mobile devices (everything from PDAs to smart phones) capable of accessing data and running applications. The trouble is, while devices are getting smaller, human hands and fingers are not.

IBM's 'Project Cinnamon,' still in beta but due to be released with IBM's next DB2 release, will put XML at the heart of DB2 Content Manager and allow customers to create automatically the data model of a database based on the document type definitions or XML schemas they choose.

In recent years the application server has greatly evolved, expanding the set of core services provided by the infrastructure. The current Java platform supports XML data handling, scalability, load balancing, and other capabilities that allow application-level services to be developed more easily and deployed more reliably. This progression must now address developers' latest concerns regarding security, distributed transactions, and reliable messaging because applications no longer stand alone - they're deployed into a technology ecosystem that can span departmental and organizational boundaries.

If you've been working with integration technologies for any length of time, you're well aware of the freight train of standards that has been careening through the industry during the last five years. These standards, particularly in the Web services space, are on the verge of doing to proprietary integration servers what SQL and J2EE standards did to database and middle-tier servers of days gone by.

Enterprise portals provide a single interface to aggregated and componentized information. They significantly reduce the navigational issues inherent with Web sites and make it easier to publish information from disparate sources. The basic building blocks of enterprise portals are portlets, which are reusable, personalized Web components displaying content from various data sources.

My colleague wrote an article for XML-J two years ago about an opportunity we had to solve our data management challenges with XML. The result of our work was our XML Data Services (XDS), an XML data access language and processing engine, which allowed us to quickly and easily manage the bi-directional transform between data sources and XML.

This article will explain how XML is used to enable businesses to work together via the Internet, in the context of the RosettaNet B2B framework. Looking at proven frameworks such as RosettaNet is important as it provides insight into what works today, and what will become important tomorrow.

Imagine a customer has hired you to put together a solution for managing a huge quantity of XML information. The firm's team is using XML because it gives them flexibility in how the data is structured. They like the fact that they do not need to specify a given record structure up front, and they can change the XML structure of records whenever they need to.

We all know that in today's threat-conscious world, communication is more than a convenience. To protect their organizations and the public in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist strike, or other significant threat, businesses and governments have been forced to reassess their ability to monitor events, notify key constituencies, and provide accurate and relevant information.

The transformation layer is the 'Rosetta stone' of the system. It understands the format of all information being transmitted among the applications and translates that information on the fly, restructuring data from one message so that it makes sense to the receiving application or applications.

The whole point of teams is to allow different specialties to complement one another and achieve the extraordinary, so it can only be a good thing to reduce the barriers between them. This article shows how to eliminate the interdependency between HTML design skills and XML processing.

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable.

XML signatures apply digital signatures to XML documents. Digital signatures let parties that exchange data ensure the identity of the sender and the integrity of the data. This last item is a benefit that physical signatures can't provide.