December 2008 Entries
Our company has a pretty wide mix of systems Windows mostly VB & .Net and Solaris Java & C++. Standards without standards. Our company’s standard for interoperability is web services, however that’s more or less where standardisation stopped. The protocols and general design of the web services is down to the individual teams. On the whole the java guys produce XML schemas for there messages, then use this to generate web service stubs using various toolkits, the .Net guys tend to just create...
I've just spent that last week building a translator, allowing us to convert a new customers catalogue data into a form our sales system can cope with. Luckily the source data was XML, so it was already in a form I could use, but there was no schema, and the structure was a bit flaky in places. I started off trying to read through the data, but the structure was just to messy, in the end I figured out I could probably do most of the grunt work with XPath. This approach seemed promising, and I got...