Joint WAS XML Feature Pack and DB2 pureXML Article on FpML Lives

I've mentioned this work a few times on the blog, so I wanted to make sure people saw the final article on DeveloperWorks.

Programming XML across the multiple tiers, Part 2: Write efficient Java EE applications that exploit an XML database server

This article uses the example of Financial Products Markup Language (FpML) to show how to program realistic native XML across the Application Server and DB2 pureXML. It shows how you can use one consistent programming model (XQuery) and one consistent data model (XML) across data access, transformation, and filtering across both the mid tier and database tier. Using this one data model which doesn't require mapping to Java objects should increase the agility of your XML centric applications as no mapping code needs to be generated or maintained across both tiers.

Even though the article is based upon FpML (which is really useful to the financial sector), the concept is applicable to all industries that have substantial amounts of XML data.

The article has code attached (both a Rational Application Developer ear project and Eclipse/ANT builds) and database load scripts, so you can play with the code to see how it works. All you need to do is define the JDBC resources to point to your DB2 instance. I also have a virtual image for this based upon the free of charge WebSphere Application Server For Developers and DB2 Express-C in case you're interested.

A view from the road

It's been a very long time since I blogged. Twitter seems to keep me from thinking about blogging as often. Also, I've been hitting a second travel season.

Last week I was at Balisage 2010 talking about Web 2.0 and XML discussing how to introduce MVC frameworks into DOJO (and other Web 2.0 widget libraries) that provides all sorts of interesting value add to DOJO. Also once MVC is in place, XML centric models integrate better into the browser. Specifically I discussed Ubiquity XForms. The goal of this work would be a clean XML story of storage to mid tier joins and query that exposed REST/XML in its original form to the browser. This avoids having to write XML to POJO to JSON conversion routines for data that originates and is stored in XML - a common case in many clients I talk to.

This week, I've been between New York and New Jersey. I've been hearing about how the financial and insurance industries work with XML. I've heard about how enterprise content management systems and data storage systems are closely related. I've heard about how XQuery as a general purpose programming model on top of such data is being used. However, I've heard of challenges that relate in linking systems together. I've also heard that having "hybrid servers" that allow XML to bridge into relational and Java systems and JSON is important. Finally, I built a nice VMware based demo of FpML processing across DB2 pureXML and the WebSphere XML Feature Pack. If you're interested in seeing how to efficiently program native XML end to end (whether you're into FpML or not), let me know and we can arrange a demo.

Programming XML Across Multiple Tiers

In the XML Feature Pack, we ship a sample that shows how to use XML centric programming in the middle tier. The sample shows how to unlock data in Web 2.0 ATOM XML encoded feeds using XQuery and present the data in a typical web application using XSLT. As an extension to this sample, we also have a sample that shows how to persist data from these feeds into an XML Database such as DB2 pureXML or Apache Derby. We included this example as we found, frequently, that people working with XML centric programming typically had large XML datastores in XML centric databases.

While the sample is there, with source code, in the XML Feature Pack, we don't explain why we coded the sample the way we did. In this new developerWorks article (Programming XML across the multiple tiers: Use XML in the middle tier for performance, fidelity, and development ease), we go into detail why for simplicity, performance, and flexibility reasons we coded the sample the way we did.

The article is worth a read. It will walk you through the new features in the XML Feature Pack and JDBC 4.0 that allow an end to end native XML programming model across the XML Feature Pack and an XML database. We hope to expand this article over time to cover more advanced concepts when working with XML databases.

Finally, here are two quick videos that show how to get the sample working with DB2 pureXML and Apache Derby.

DB2 pureXML (Part 1/2)
Direct Link (HD Version)

Apache Derby (Part 2/2)
Direct Link (HD Version)