“In this article and others to follow, I’ll take a closer look
at some of the practical things you can do with XML.”
“Luckily for this purpose, the Linux community has taken to
XML as well as I could have hoped. Many Linux development projects
and languages use XML processors and libraries. The Cocoon
project is building around Apache an XML-processing system that is,
in at least one area, ahead of most commercial equivalents. KDE,
the K Desktop Environment, uses XML as the native file format for
its impressive KOffice. GNOME has an entire menagerie of XML tools,
libraries, and applications, some part of the general releases and
some strictly in CVS, the Concurrent Versions System. It is also
nice to see that a trickle of apps — mostly GNOME Toolkit apps
using libxml — are moving to XML-based config files, as I
advocated in April.”
In commercial space, Oracle 8i has come to Linux with an
aggressive adoption of XML and many tools for XML document
management. As I write, IBM’s DB2 Universal Database 6.1 should be
winging its way by courier to those who signed up for development
copies; it, too, makes a strong commitment to XML. The other
Universal DBMS engines for Linux are not far behind.”