May 13, 2003

In a London bathed in bright sunshine, the XML Europe 2003 conference held 5-8 May 2003 offered its annual snapshot of the XML landscape in Europe, and with Web services as one of the hotter topics.

As in most XML conferences put on by IDE Alliance (and its predecessor Graphic Communications Association), the program offered its fair share of technical discussions and publishing applications. Yet this year's event gave the unmistakable impression that XML in general and Web services in particular were ready for business or at least ready to talk business.

But are Web services in 2003 ready to do business? Three presentations at XML Europe discussed various aspects of this question, looking at the emergence of new standards to make electronic business possible for millions of smaller enterprises, tools for building security into business Web services, and a difficult internal integration case study, with an elegant Web services solution.

Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems in his opening keynote said the XML industry has finally started getting the ubiquitous and inexpensive tools for e-business promised since the early days of XML. Bosak co-chaired the W3C committee that developed the first XML specifications. He now chairs OASIS's Universal Business Language (UBL) committee.

Bosak said that ever since humans began communicating with each other by scratching on stones, they used those scratchings for documents to convey business data; in fact, one of his slides showed an image of a prehistoric stone tablet that he said contained a record of an ancient business transaction. And while business technology has progressed demonstrably since the days of stone tablets, the conduct of business still needs documents, often to provide a legally binding record of transactions.

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