XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as the middleware approach of choice for companies that want to create distributed applications (Web services) on the Internet. By itself, XML provides a message format. In the past year, XML has been supplemented by a variety of protocols that extend its power. XML's tag description facility has been extended with XML script to make it easier to describe complex data formats. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has been widely adopted to provide a transport mechanism.