But there are also commercial tools available to tackle the problems. Among the tools that help development teams tackle modern integration jobs is Altova’s MissionKit. The latest version of the tool set adds interesting features that target the needs of the day.

Altova’s recently released MissionKit 2013 suite includes updates to its XML Spy tools that offer intelligence assistance for dealing with validation errors: updates to MapForce to support mapping for SQL stored procedures as well as an enhanced API for integrations into Java programs; and updates to its UModel tool that cover UML 2.4 and SysML 1.2. Importantly, UModel and other tools in the suite have improved support for XBRL and its most recent US-GAAP taxonomy, version 2012.

At release time, we talked to long-time industry analyst Peter O’Kelly about the trends driving these tools. Altova’s product line has evolved greatly since planting its original roots as an XML domain tool, said O’Kelly, who served as Altova’s product marketing manager and evangelist.

“It has expanded. It’s not just for people who work with XML,” said O’Kelly who now serves as principal analyst at O’Kelly Assoc.

The toolset tries to buffer developers from underlying complexity, he said, because teams always have to map between legacy and new technologies.  It is important to bring users a consistent framework, said O’Kelly.

According to Woolbright, OmegaFi started out in the early nineties with a client/server based software application that they sometimes had to install for college students that were not yet computer savvy. The company quickly moved to Web applications as the Internet grew in popularity, and now it provides software as a service via the Web.

One of the technical challenges that OmegaFi faces is keeping up with the expectation of their core user base who are now much more tech-savvy than college students were two decades ago. Today’s fraternity treasurers grew up with Google and Facebook and expect a seamless user interface. As OmegaFi integrated with third-party systems to provide a broader range of financial services and customization options, they found their own integration architecture lacking. “We didn’t have the ability to offer up and secure data services from our system to trusted third parties,” lamented Woolbright.

To overcome that challenge, Woolbright turned to an XML gateway from Forum Systems. The security appliance focuses on identity federation to increase integration opportunities while increasing the Web applications’ overall security. According to Woolbright, there were use cases new to Forum Systems that had to be worked out. “We worked with Forum to build new types of authentication standards into their product that would work well with proprietary systems we’ve built from scratch to serve our clients’ unique needs.”

Reflecting on the process, Woolbright had a few pieces of advice for other CIOs that are looking at adding security or ID management appliances into their application infrastructure:

• First on Woolbright’s list is the breadth of third-party identity providers with which the appliance can be integrated. Focus on using industry standards to play well with other applications that are identity service consumers.
• Second, “Look for products that can use identity across both the front-end Web applications and the back-end data services so that you have identity enforcement throughout the entirety of the transaction.”
• Don’t overlook traditional gateway features like security, performance and transaction monitoring, debugging and load balancing. Woolbright stresses that gateways vary greatly with respect to the ease of use of their products and tooling.
• “Finally, it is important to look at how the appliances can help you govern your infrastructure by providing information about the transactions you are delivering to consumers,” Woolbright concludes. Adding that many tools provide useful service logging features that can ease maintenance tasks. 

Prior to coming to Progress, Bhatt was responsible for Autodesk’s global Architecture Engineering and Construction Solutions Division, where he was in charge of software development, marketing, product management, product design, business development and finance resources.  Mr. Bhatt also served as the CFO and Head of Corporate Development for Buzzsaw.com, before that company was acquired by Autodesk in 2001.

“I am honored to be selected for this important role and thrilled to be joining Progress Software at this critical time in the company’s evolution,” said Bhatt, as stated in the company’s press release. 

“Progress has an excellent team, a large and impressive customer base, a loyal partner group and a very attractive portfolio of innovative products and solutions that enable businesses to become more responsive,” said Bhatt in a statement. ”

Bhatt takes posts formerly filled by Richard Reidy, who had held the jobs on an interim basis since an August announcement that he would vacate the positions. – Valerie Sarnataro

XQuery arose over ten years ago to bring a SQL-style treatment to XML. As a recent story on XQuery shows, this query language is still looking for a foothold. Though he admits it is a bit of a sleeper, industry expert Peter O’Kelly, who appears in the ”A look at XQuery today”, says XQuery is ”a really powerful mechanism for working with collections of documents.”

As he portrays it, XQuery seems to have some of the benefits of other domain-specific languages. You need to write less code and thus have less work to maintain, he says. And, as with SQL, you can rely on the XQuery data base management system to optimize queries and shield developers from complexity.

O’Kelly suggests that one reason you don’t hear too much about XQuery is that some of its users treat it like a secret weapon.

Although XBRL looms as an SEC mandate, uptake is still slow for the XML-based language that handles business information. To spur more interest, the nonprofit  XBRL consortium is staging a contest to find the top open source tools for analyzing financial data. The competition, dubbed the XBRL Challenge, features a $20,000 grand prize to be awarded to the contestant who submits the most useful application using XBRL-formatted data.

Participants may include a company, team or individual developer. Entrants will be granted access to a database of XBRL financial fundamentals from all public companies and documents on how to work with XBRL data. Webinar and in-person meetings will also be offered to aid in working with the XBRL data, including an online XBRL Challenge briefing on August 3, 2011.

Submissions will be accepted up until January 31, 2012, while final judging and awarding of prizes will occur in February 2012. The panel of five judges will include: Alfred Berkeley, chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems; Marc Donner, head of Google Finance; Eric Gillespie, managing partner at Viano Capital; Vijay Khanna, general partner of GIV Venture Partners and Paul Ratnaraj, director of advanced initiatives at Wharton Research Data Services.

As RESTful non-XML applications have gained attention, continued uptake of XML has been somewhat overshadowed. But David McGahey, Product Marketing Manager at Altova, can attest to its growing use, as various industries and compliance efforts center on XML as a data interchange format.
“XML is becoming more and more pervasive. It is the predominant language for exchanging data,” said McGahey.

People are encountering it in workplaces, he said. Yet, many times they are unaware of XML’s presence in the process. Here, the machine-to-machine role of XML data transformation comes into play.
“It’s becoming more and more automated. It is processed through systems automatically,” said McGahey, pointing to SEC-mandated XBRL as a prime example.

Business analytics now are very often based on XML output. And those analytics continue to call for better and faster charting. So the new rev of MissionKit (2011r2) has an updated styling engine that can stream output to generate reports based on XML-type (for example, XBRL) data. New chart types supported are stacked bar, area and stacked area – and customizable chart features include chart overlays, background image and color gradients and variable axis label positions.

On the design side, the recent updates of Altova’s UModel software – available separately or as part of MissionKit – is notable for support of UML 2.0 and its enhanced capabilities for code generation. UModel users can now generate code in C#, Java, or Visual Basic directly from a state machine diagram. Of additional note in the Altova suite is UModel business process modeling support that provides conversions from BPMN 1.0 to BPMN 2.0.

But IBM has added data caching to its Data Power engine. Intel expanded features too. In the latter case, cloud computing is a big driver. And workflow orchestration is the added feature.

That’s what Todd Cramer, director of product marketing for Intel’s SOA products group told us in conversation last year. Cramer said:

“We see an evolution for XML gateways. They first processed XML at wire speed, then [they began] to validate for security. We think in the new environment of the cloud, what you need is an added workflow on top of it. We added a workflow engine. Cloud is the real thing that is changing the game.  Now, a service may be scaled off site to public or private cloud.” 

It is not BPEL-style workflow orchestration that Cramer is discussing – rather, it is machine-to-machine orchestration. It is fair to say the XML accelerator has recently become a more interesting piece of SOA infrastructure. The gateway itself stands at a crossroads.

In MissionKit Version 2010 Revision 3, new features include support for industry standards iXBRL and National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), and support for mapping data based on SAP’s IDoc EDI format. Altova has also added in some integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Some highlights to the individual tools include:

• XMLSpy – can now validate internal naming and coding conventions outside of the XML Schema standard and integrates with VS2010.
• MapForce – C++ code generation has been updated to MSXML6. This data mapping tool can now generate C++ for 64-bit applications and perform mapping based on SAP’s IDoc EDI format.
• UModel  – can now generate code in C# 4.0 and reverse engineer C# code to create UML models.
• StyleVision – now supports Inline XBRL (iXBRL) in visual stylesheet and electronic forms design. The iXBRL standard embeds XBRL fragments into an HTML document so that the same source can be used for both human and machine processing.

For more information, check out Altova.com.

Some find it convenient to have many of their integration and security features centralized in an appliance layer.

Just this month Citrix Systems released five new NetScaler Application Firewall appliances targeted at public and private clouds, as well as Web applications. One of the major functions of the NetScaler appliances is performing SOAP, XML and HTML security checks. The company offers both hardware and “virtual” appliances.

Where in the early 2000s these sorts of appliances were looked at more as a performance booster to XML crunching, Citrix is selling NetScaler as “application accelerators.” These newer devices include a host of features, including: traffic management, load balancing, content switching, content caching, SSL acceleration, Web application firewalls, network optimization and application performance monitoring.

Long gone is the heyday of the pure-play XML accelerator.