Summary

We have covered a lot of territory, from parsing XML and discovering Web Services via UDDI, to talking about the United Nations solution for B2B (ebXML) and Microsoft's own BizTalk Framework.

The goal of this chapter was to give you an overall understanding of XML: where it came from, what people are doing with it now, and where it is going from a business perspective. XML is bound to touch every aspect of computing in one way or another, but its impact on the business-to-business and enterprise-level sectors will be nothing less than profound. We urge you to read more on the subject. For more information, here are some links that you might find useful:

Robin Cover's SGML/XML Pages: http://www.coverpages.org/

Microsoft's XML Pages: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/

Microsoft BizTalk Page: http://microsoft.com/biztalk/

Microsoft's SOAP Pages: http://msdn.microsoft.com/soap/

ebXML Initiative: http://www.ebXML.org/

cXML: http://www.cXML.org/

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration: http://www.uddi.org/