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nTegrator and XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a text-based means to describe and represent
data. In XML, every piece of data, referred to as an
element, is represented by a name, some associated
attributes, and a text based value. X ML
elements can contain other elements, thus introducing a
hierarchical structure to the overall representation of
the data. Because it is text based, XML provides a
vendor neutral means of describing and transferring
data.
The
fundamental unit of data in nTegrator
is a property, which embodies a name, a type, a value,
and some attributes. The supported property types
are:
-
Standard
types: character, short, integer, float, string, binary
large object, file
- Rowset:
Properties with this type contain one or more properties,
thus introducing the concept of a hierarchy
of properties.
Because both nTegrator and XML share
similar hierarchical exchange formats, it is relatively easy to convert
one to the other.
Figure 1
illustrates the mapping of a nTegrator hierarchy into XML. The
XML tag names are the names of the properties in the nTegrator
namespace. For purposes of illustration, the type of nTegrator property
has been inserted in bold parentheses at the end of the lines containing
the XML elements. In actual usage, the data in parentheses would not be
present in the XML document.
Notice that rowsets and collections
are used to create sub-elements in XML elements. Notice also that the
<mailboxes> element contains sub-elements from two different computers.
One advantage of using a nTegrator or XML interchange format is that it
is possible to merge data from two different sources. A particular
advantage of using nTegrator is that the data sources can reside on
different computers.
In most SOA implementations, the
XML data must be parsed in order to transform it into a machine
understandable format. In nTegrator, the XML data is always kept and
exchanged in an internal, machine understandable format so that parsing
is not necessary. It is only converted into text based XML when it needs
to be sent to a program outside of the nTegrator environment.
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