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nTegrator and XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a text-based means to describe and arepresent 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. XML 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.