Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
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XML
What is XML?
XML, short for Extensible Markup Language, is a text-based format for storing and moving structured data. It uses nested tags to describe both the structure and the meaning of data, in a way that a person and a machine can both read. The World Wide Web Consortium published it as a standard in 1998, and through the early 2000s it became the universal format for passing data between systems.
An XML document is built from elements marked by opening and closing tags, attributes that add detail to those elements, and a hierarchy that captures how the data relates to itself. A document can be validated against a schema, an XSD or an older DTD, to guarantee it matches an agreed structure before anything tries to process it. That self-describing, verifiable quality is what made it the backbone of so many integrations. A bank exchanging transaction records with a partner, for instance, could rely on a shared XSD to reject a malformed file at the door rather than halfway through processing.
JSON has since taken over most web APIs thanks to its lighter syntax and natural fit with JavaScript. XML is far from gone, though. It still runs SOAP web services, office formats like DOCX and XLSX, RSS feeds, and the configuration files of countless enterprise systems.
XML at Dallonses
Plenty of the systems our clients depend on still speak XML, especially the older enterprise and financial platforms that aren't going anywhere soon. When we connect a modern product to one of them, we meet it on its own terms: parse the XML, validate it against the schema, and translate it into something the new system can work with cleanly.
We don't treat a format as outdated just because it isn't trendy. XML earns its place where structure and validation matter, and we use it without complaint when the integration calls for it. The job is making old and new systems talk reliably, whatever shape the data arrives in.
Stuck connecting a modern product to a legacy XML system? We've done it before.
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