Intelligent Data Meets Linux Bentonville AR

Posted by : Maggie Biggs Linux Advisorhed: Intelligent data meets Linuxdek: XML databases help businesses create low-cost, next-generation Web applications.by Maggie Biggs

When measured in Internet time, neither Linux nor XML should be considered new. Both have been around for some time, though they are evolving along different paths. Now, however, Linux and XML are proving a potent and economical combination for businesses that need to create next-generation Web applications.

Since Linux was originally created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the operating system has continued to gain ground as a solid, cost-effective platform that can be used on a wide variety of hardware-from servers and desktops to wireless devices and other post-PC technology.

In particular, the marriage of the Apache Web Server >www.apache.org< to the Linux operating system has proven a highly cost-effective mechanism for serving up Web applications. Today, 60 percent of all Web domains use the Apache Web server, according to a Netcraft survey./p>

The majority of first-generation Web applications served up static content using HTML. But, as commercial and academic use of the Web increased, the need to serve up more dynamic content also grew. Enter Extensible Markup Language (XML). Derived from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), the first draft describing XML was created in 1996 by a group within the (W3C) World Wide Web Consortium, which was chaired by Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems. XML can best be described as a universal format for exchanging structured documents and data on the Web.

You might think of XML as similar to HTML in that both ma...

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