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Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ztect who wrote (2225)	8/22/1998 4:42:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3194

Thank you so much for this ray of hope! Since there are currently only 2 brokers following ODIS (Alex. Brown & Sons threw the towel...) it's good to see other analysts jumping aboard our bandwagon. August 24, 1998, Issue: 729 Section: Electronic Commerce XML Jump-Starts Web Transactions Richard Karpinski Momentum behind the Extensible Markup Language continues to build as new tools emerge for XML-based forms and data management, as well as a proposed addition to the core language itself. XML's influence continues to spread to practically all corners of the enterprise, but the latest developments are particularly designed for electronic-commerce applications. "The brunt of XML's Web impact will be on restructuring the economics of Web-based transactions," according to analyst Rita Knox at Gartner Group. For instance, Internet forms company UWI.com last week unveiled the Extensible Forms Description Language, an XML-based protocol for creating, viewing and filing complex business forms on the Web. XFDL was co-authored by UWI.com and Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML specification and an XML consultant. What does XFDL add to Internet forms? Today, HTML- and Java-based forms deliver the data from a form-but not the form itself-back to the server when it is submitted. That causes problems if a form is incorrectly filled out because users often have to start over entirely with a blank form. Those limitations are also a drawback for companies looking to deliver legally binding documents over the Web, such as sales contracts, Bray said. To solve this problem, UWI.com developed the Universal Form Description Language (UFDL), which supports digital signatures for authentication and at signing delivers all the source code and business logic of the document back to the Web server-essentially a record of the entire transaction. XFDL represents an open, XML-based implementation of the core UFDL technology, according to Bray. A beta version of UWI.com's InternetForms Viewer, available in September, will be the first software to incorporate the XFDL open protocol. Also launched last week was the XML Object Manager, an XML-based data management application from object database vendor Object Design Inc. XML Object Manager is middleware that streamlines access to XML-tagged data and can boost the performance of XML applications through caching, said Coco Jaenicke, a product marketing manager at Object Design. One of the first users of Object Design's XML technology is Siemens Business Communications Systems, which used it to build a Web-based time-card system for 7,000 employees. It lets employees submit time cards and managers approve them online. Siemens expects to save $500,000 a year by using the application. Finally, the World Wide Web Consortium earlier this month acknowledged a joint submission by IBM and Microsoft that aims to fine-tune XML's Document Type Definitions, or DTDs, the method for describing XML documents. Together, an XML document's tags and a related DTD provide all the data necessary to describe the content of that document. The submission, dubbed Document Content Description, or DCD, adds important new features to DTDs. For starters, DCD is written in XML and the related Resource Definition Framework, meaning that if DCD is adopted, the method for describing XML documents would then be based in XML as well. DCD also adds key new features, most important the ability to assign a data type to an XML tag. For instance, a tag called "SHIP DATE" could be described in terms of date and time, and thus a value of 010199 would be understood as Jan. 1, 1999. Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.