Book Review of the Month

Using XML with Legacy Business Applications Michael C. Rawlins

	A lot of IT people are busy making different applications running on different platforms "talk" to each other. XML was invented as the "Esperanto" of the IT world to get these systems to understand each other. In practice however it just isn't that simple, as most of these applications don't talk XML yet, until this book. This book is a real "do it" book. It does not teach you XML or XSLT but shows you how to use it. What I especially liked is that he discusses his design considerations; he wants you to understand the why's. Once he thinks you know the basics he goes back to his basic design and improves it, to make it make it fully reusable and modular making it even better. Mr. Rawlins gives you toolbox of utilities, with the source code, that can become the building blocks for your own application integration system. I have not come across a book with as much usable code in my IT career. We have already redesigned quite a few of our systems because of it. If you are into "connectivity" you can't be without this book. P.S. The word Legacy in the title does not imply big mainframes. (Johannes de Jong - Bartender, January 2004)
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