Matthew Zager

Our journey began with our Department of Defense research projects when we saw an opportunity to solve our data management challenges with XML (http://xml.sys-con.com/read/40411.htm). The journey continued with the evolution of that work as it applied to exposing legacy data sources as XML through data-oriented Web services (http://xml.sys-con.com/read/45527.htm). We continue to build upon this foundation by broadening our service-oriented architecture (SOA) with these XML-enabled yet disjoint systems as we look to Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to orchestrate their complex interactions. My primary focus over the last year has shifted from enabling legacy data sources and applications as services to orchestrating the business processes that encapsulate those services. The motivation behind this work is to bring automation and repeatability to decision-s... (more)

The Evolution of Data-Oriented Services

My colleague wrote an article for XML-J two years ago about an opportunity we had to solve our data management challenges with XML ("Managing Data Sources with XSLT," www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=40411). The result of our work was our XML Data Services (XDS), an XML data access language and processing engine, which allowed us to quickly and easily manage the bi-directional transform between data sources and XML. A couple years have passed, and new challenges have arisen and been solved by leveraging our XML data access engine and Web services. My primary focus over the last co... (more)